Mollies Pack Wolves Baiting a Bison (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

English: Wolves chasing an elk (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Eastern wolves at Wolf Science Center, Ernstbrunn, Lower Austria (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Wolf Hunt (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The 'food regulators' are working at top speed to remove sources of nutrition.It’s a Tangled Web Ontario Regulators Weave for Michael Schmidt

Removing top predators has far reaching - and detrimental effects - on the biological balances in the area deprived of their services.

Dear John,

It all comes down to the next few days.

If far-right politicians get their way in Congress, many of our nation's wolves will face constant pursuit, maiming and even violent deaths at the hands of hunters and trappers. These politicians are sneaking wolf-killing "riders" into must-pass spending bills -- and we need your help to stop them. With a vote expected to happen as soon as Friday, the Center is pushing hard to head off these poison pills, organizing our nearly 1 million members and supporters to speak out to Congress and tell them to drop this wolf-killing legislation.

We're facing stiff opposition. In Wyoming, if Rep. Cynthia Lummis succeeds, her rider would bring back shoot-on-sight rules that set no limits on wolf killing across much of the state. In the Great Lakes region, where 64 percent of Michigan citizens voted last year to end wolf hunting, the rider backed by newly-minted Speaker of the House Paul Ryan would ignore the people and jump-start organized hunts using neck snares and trained dogs that could decimate the wolf population.This is not how democracy or wolf conservation should work.

These kinds of fights take enormous resources, which is why a generous advocate has offered to match your contribution on behalf of wolves when you give before Dec. 31. Please help by donating to the Endangered Species Defense Fund today.

We know from experience that when federal protections are yanked, wolves die and decades of recovery work come to a screeching halt. The Center and our allies won reprieves from these death sentences in many states, but if these riders pass, vicious wolf-killing campaigns will resume in Wyoming, Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin. Oregon, Washington, Utah and Colorado could follow suit, eliminating safe havens for wolves one by one.

Please help us stop the killing by donating to the Endangered Species Defense Fund today.

The Center has made saving wolves a top priority for decades -- leveraging science, law and activism to win a string of victories in court and Congress for their protection. Now we're facing a whole new level of animosity as lawmakers commit themselves to ending wolf protection. With your support, we'll organize our lawyers, scientists and activists in Washington and across the country to oppose this deadly agenda.

With the Center you can secure a future for America's wolves and other wildlife on the brink of extinction, ensuring their protection, securing safeguards for their habitat and fighting off attacks by those looking to weaken the Endangered Species Act. The enemies of wolves want to see them wiped out across most of the country for the second time in a century. The endgame is on.

Please donate as generously as you can to the Endangered Species Defense Fund.

British Columbia is world renowned for its scenery, beauty, and magnificent old growth rainforest which happens to be home for trees that are hundreds of years old.

Recently, the BC Government let a logging company known as Teal Jones set up cut blocks in the Walbran Valley on Vancouver Island. The cut blocks are set in one of the last decent stands of old growth forest in British Columbia. BC's landmass is 70% forest, and the old growth doesn't take up much of that percentage.

I'm baffled as to why they're logging the old growth as their are TONS of other area's nearby that aren't old growth rainforest, where they could've set up logging operations instead. We don't have much old growth left, and as a proud British Columbian, I'm not willing to lose one of our greatest natural wonders.

What needs to be done:

Create legislation that protects all the Old Growth Forest in British Columbia
Make it so logging companies MUST replant trees of the same species that were logged in any area that is clear cut
Have limits on how much land is allowed to be clear cut in a logging area

This petition has gained a ton of momentum, and I invite not just British Columbians, but everyone who cares about the environment to join me and be a part of history.

Sign Brandon's petition

Dear John,

It took more than 10 years of lawsuits and advocacy pressure, but the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently announced plans to halt almost all uses of the brain-harming pesticide chlorpyrifos.

This is a huge, long overdue win — and now it’s time to bring a full ban to the finish line.

Tell EPA that ALL communities deserve protection! The agency’s current proposal won’t protect children or workers in communities where chlorpyrifos is used on non-food crops like alfalfa and cotton. Applications on fields where genetically engineered seeds are being produced and tested in Hawai'i, California and other states would continue as well. This isn’t right.

Before the public comment period closes on January 5, tell EPA to take chlorpyrifos completely off the market — for good.

There’s no doubt that this chemical is a problem. Just last week, a new study showed that children exposed to pesticides like chlorpyrifos have lung function comparable to kids breathing second-hand cigarette smoke.

And strong, extensive science links chlorpyrifos to serious neurological harm for children, including reduced IQ, loss of working memory and developmental delays.

Join us today in urging EPA to ban ALL uses of chlorpyrifos. The science is crystal clear and action is long overdue.

We know that Dow AgroSciences — which manufactures the millions of pounds of chlorpyrifos sprayed on agricultural fields every year — will do everything in its power to stop or weaken a national ban.

Tell EPA to stand up to the pesticide industry! It’s time to get chlorpyrifos banned, once and for all.

Thank you for speaking up!

Pesticide Action Network North America
Oakland, CA | Minneapolis, MN
510.788.9020 | community@panna.org | www.panna.org

Cover story in The Nation here. It is at http://www.thenation.com/article/isis_wants_a_clash/

A reminder that Informed Comment is having its annual fundraiser --- thanks for your support: http://www.juancole.com/2015/11/informed-fundraiser-journalism.html

ISIS Wants a Clash of the Civilizations: Let’s Not Give In

It’s a huge error to dignify these desert pirates as a “state” on which one might wage war as an equal.

By

Juan Cole

After 9/11, French President Jacques Chirac rejected the “war on terror” proposed by George W. Bush, urging the United States to treat terrorism as a form of criminality. His refusal to go along with Bush adviser Karl Rove’s Orwellian use of language is perhaps the only thing that Chirac  will be remembered for, but in some ways it’s legacy enough. In contrast, after the November terrorist attacks on Paris, President François Hollande, a Socialist, made the grave error of announcing that France is now at war. Actual states should not grant such legitimacy to small bands of violent criminals, and the deployment of the language and techniques of war is the best way to lose a campaign against them.

The language of war elevates terrorists to the very status to which they aspire: that of legitimate combatants. The fevered hothouses of extremism, whether in Belgian slums or Saudi Wahhabi mosques, generate a narrative that serves as the pretext for violent action. A country like France is depicted as engaging in monstrous acts, killing defenseless children and women from the air. Gullible teenagers are challenged by a jihadi recruiter with the need to do something to halt the atrocities. They are groomed as heroes, as soldiers saving their people. War is, after all, the one social context in which heinous actions are permitted. The innocent civilians whom these recruits will murder are depicted as enemy combatants: Did these people not vote for the government committing the atrocities? Do they not support it? And even if they’re actually innocent, isn’t it necessary that they be sacrificed so as to produce a public backlash, pushing the government to overreact in a direction favorable to the terrorists?

The young men recruited by the late petty thief Abdelhamid Abaaoud were, it should go without saying, not soldiers; they were delinquents outfitted with bombs and machine guns instead of stilettos. They were marginalized people, the people discarded by the sluggish capitalism of Belgium or France, given no purpose in life by their squalid environs, humiliated by quotidian racism, denied the dignity of productive labor, and, in the case of Belgium, poorly educated by a mediocre state-run school system. Others from their milieu, however, made respectable lives for themselves (Abaaoud’s own family, filled with shame, hoped last year that he was dead), and saw their circumstances as a challenge, not an excuse for crime. Abaaoud and his partners in crime deserve no military stripes.

Talk of fighting a war against these criminals bestows on them a dignity that their despicable life choices should not warrant and inadvertently covers them with glory. They plotted out a spectacle in a soccer stadium in which they would blow themselves up, along with other spectators in the stands, before TV cameras beaming the events to the world. But only one of them was able to scalp a ticket, and French police were not so stupid as to admit someone with an explosive vest under his coat. The panicked killers had to detonate their payloads uselessly outside the stadium, and some of their bombs malfunctioned, killing only the wearer. The others shot up restaurants, cafés, and a concert hall off-camera, and thus were denied a televised horror-movie production. Nevertheless, American TV provided us with so-called counterterrorism experts who declared that this sad-sack carnage was superbly planned and executed.

Murders in restaurants are hardly an act of war, and can be accomplished by anyone with a firearm. Our biker gangs and the mentally ill—whom the National Rifle Association insists should be amply supplied with assault weapons and extra-ammunition magazines—routinely achieve that sort of mayhem in the United States, and we not only don’t declare war, we don’t even take practical steps to stop it. The Paris terrorists bear much more resemblance to biker-gang members and unbalanced mass shooters than they do to the special-forces operatives of a proper state.

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Hollande’s rhetoric of war conflates two quite different policy challenges. One is to deal with security in Europe and work against the radicalization of the slums; the other is to roll back the minions of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and his so-called Islamic State in eastern Syria and western Iraq. Even in the latter case, rhetoric matters: It’s a huge error to dignify that group—more akin to desert pirates than a government—as a “state” (much less an Islamic one) on which one might wage war as an equal. Baghdadi is the nom de guerre for a minor Iraqi academic, Ibrahim al-Samarrai, who would not have gotten tenure in a good Islamic-studies program. The rest of the Muslim world falls down laughing at his declaration, made while flaunting a Rolex, that he is a caliph, a successor of Harun al-Rashid.

For Baghdadi to call his band of human traffickers, rapists, drug smugglers, and looters the “Islamic State” is rather like a Mexican drug cartel adopting the moniker “the Vatican,” and our adopting that term thereafter (“The Vatican kidnapped 30 people today”) when reporting on its violence. Journalists would resist such linguistic coercion in the case of Catholics; they should resist it in the case of Muslims as well. The name commonly given to the group in the Arabic press is “Daesh,” which is what we should call it as well to avoid being enlisted as its propagandists. To the objection that Daesh holds territory, it may be replied that narco-terrorist groups in the Global South often do too, without being dignified as states.

A “war” on terror that characterizes, for example, all Syrian refugees as potential combatants thus plays right into the hands of recruiters like Abaaoud, who aim to “sharpen the contradictions” between Muslims and those of Christian heritage. We should rather be observing that some Syrians have joined a criminal cartel that has taken over some desert towns at gunpoint, but that most Syrians have not done so. Indeed, large numbers have voted with their feet: When Daesh took Mosul, 500,000 residents fled immediately in horror and disgust, and many more got out later. Hundreds of thousands of Syrians—and not only Kurds—have fled Raqqa Province (pre-2011 population: 900,000), Daesh’s current headquarters. Those are the refugees on the backs of whom US politicians are now wretchedly grandstanding. (The Daesh cartel has probably kidnapped on the order of 3 million people—not the 8 million that many observers cite, since the latter neglect to figure in the masses who have fled the territory of the phony caliphate.)

Daesh flourishes in areas where the central state has lost legitimacy and collapsed. The rural Sunni Arabs of eastern Syria may despise Daesh, but some despise it less than they do the murderous Stalinism of the Baath Party still holding Damascus. Mosulis may be miserable under al-Samarrai, but they would also be humiliated and marginalized by the hard-line Shiite militias who dictate politics in Baghdad. Any attempt to roll up Daesh needs to reckon with its popularity in some quarters. For a minority of Sunni Arabs in the wastelands left behind by decrepit, corrupt, and discriminatory governments, it is the lesser evil.

Those demanding easy answers or immediate results in Syria and Iraq are being childish, and the rhetoric of war is puerile. If it were easy to defeat organizations like Daesh, many contemporary long-term conflicts could have been avoided. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, Daesh-like groups duked it out from the 1990s until 2003, engulfing central and southern Africa in an apocalypse that killed 5.4 million people. One of those groups, the Uganda-based Lord’s Resistance Army, bears a special resemblance to Daesh, albeit with a Christian background. The Colombian government has spent decades trying to wipe out the FARC (which also at some points held territory, inducted minors, and committed atrocities, though its ideology is as far left as Daesh’s is far right). Simply bombing Raqqa, with no practical plan for a ground force to take territory away from Daesh, won’t improve the current situation, however much it may appease public anger.

As for the quite separate challenge of dealing with the radicalization of youth in Europe’s bidonvilles, many experts argue that it’s more like a public-health problem than it is a war. Urban best practices such as community policing and proactive government intervention to improve the dignity of people (much more important even than addressing poverty) have been shown to yield results. Demonizing immigrant Syrians, or all Muslims, as potential Daesh recruits may actually drive some into the arms of the extremists. Policy-makers who wish to address this crisis need to use the tools of public policy and enlightened police work rather than the blunt instruments of war. Above all, they need to stop buying into Daesh’s attempt to provoke a clash of civilizations.

Juan Cole is the Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History and director of the Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies at the University of Michigan.

Setya to Report Energy Minister to Police, Lawyer Says

House Speaker Setya Novanto has threatened to report Indonesia’s energy minister to the police for making public a voice recording of Setya allegedly attempting to extort $4 billion worth of shares from mining giant Freeport Indonesia.

US Designates a German Citizen as a ‘Global Terrorist’

Washington. The US State Department on Wednesday named Emrah Erdogan, a German citizen whom it said had joined and fought with the al Qaeda and al Shabaab militant groups, as a global terrorist. The designation generally bars Americans from dealing with him and freezes any of his assets under US jurisdiction. Erdogan is serving a […]

Dear John,

We're in the middle of the biggest civil rights moment of our generation; ColorOfChange has big plans in 2016 to transform the way our communities are policed, to shift culture and to make sure that presidential and senate candidates speak to black voters...so we're staffing up.

Our new cohort of campaign managers will be taking the lead on all of our justice work, but they can’t do it without the support of our members. ColorOfChange has been running campaigns to hold politicians and corporations accountable for ten years, and in addition to heart and courage, the work also takes funding from our members. Can you chip in today to support our talented new cohort?

We need to raise $200,000 by December 31 to help them push forward with new campaigns in 2016. Can you help us reach our goal with a $3 donation?

Yeshi, Thomas, Enchanta, Tatiana, Joshua and Bernard all came to ColorOfChange because they believe in creating a more just society for Black people. We are excited to have a new generation of forward-thinking organizers at ColorOfChange, and we want to make sure they have the technology they need to run campaigns, as well as the funding they need for rapid response tactics and travel.

Previous campaigners helped us take on ALEC, remove hate speech from Fox News airwaves, forced NY officials to appoint a special prosecutor for unjust police killings and win Net Neutrality. We know our new cohort can continue this legacy.

Thanks and peace,

Rashad, Arisha, Brittaney, Johnny, Evan and the rest of the ColorOfChange team

ColorOfChange is building a movement to elevate the voices of Black folks and our allies, and win real social and political change. Help keep our movement strong.

No. 804, Dec. 10, 2015

The Pressure Mounts: Another Fossil Fuel Lease Sale Halted

For the second time in two months, the Obama administration has pushed back a planned sale of oil and gas leases on public lands. The latest halt came on Monday, when the Bureau of Land Management called off an auction in Washington, D.C., in the face of plans by climate protesters (including the Center for Biological Diversity) to rally outside the sale. A similar lease sale was cancelled in Salt Lake City in November.

The Center and local activists also took to the streets in Reno, Nev., on Tuesday to protest a lease sale there -- part of a growing "Keep It in the Ground" movement across the country. Why? Halting new fossil fuel lease sales on America's public lands and offshore areas would keep up to 450 billion tons of carbon pollution out of the atmosphere. The timing is particularly important as world leaders gather in Paris to hammer out a global climate agreement.

"If the administration can't handle the optics of auctioning fossil fuels while negotiating a climate deal in Paris, it shouldn't be auctioning off fossil fuels at all," said the Center's Taylor McKinnon.

Thanks to all of you who came out to protests. Check out these photos and read more aboutD.C. and Reno; then stay tuned for how you can help at the next rally.

Don't Let Congress Sell Out Wolves -- Take Action

Things are getting ugly in Congress this week as lawmakers try to arrive at a budget deal to keep the government from shutting down. Attached to this year's Interior spending bill are more than 100 policy riders, including 17 pushed by Republicans that would weaken or remove protections for endangered species. Among the most troubling: provisions that would end Endangered Species Act protection for wolves in Wyoming and the Great Lakes states. Another would incentivize a fracking boom by lifting a crude oil export ban that has been in place since the 1970s.

We need your help this week to stop these damaging "riders" from being included in a final, must-pass spending bill.

Please take two minutes to call your senators today and urge them to push for a clean budget deal -- no backroom dealings.

Endangered Species Act Success: Rare West Coast Fish Declared Recovered

The Modoc sucker -- a small, fleshy-lipped fish now dwelling in 12 California and Oregon waterways -- has just become the second fish ever to be declared sufficiently recovered to be removed from the U.S. endangered species list. Due to habitat restoration -- including fencing livestock out of its native tributaries and removing invasive fish -- the species' population has doubled since 1985, when only about 1,300 individuals existed in the world.

"The Endangered Species Act successfully prevented the extinction of the Modoc sucker and spurred habitat restoration that has allowed this native fish to recover," said the Center's Jeff Miller. "But given climate trends and increasing likelihood of drought, the status of the species will need to be monitored closely." Accordingly the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will continue to watch the sucker's status for another decade to make sure its population remains stable.

The Modoc sucker's removal from the endangered species list closely follows the recovery of the Oregon chub in February of this year.

Read more in Scientific American.

Will World Leaders Do What's Needed in Paris?

The Center's team in Paris has been working hard this week to urge world leaders to take action that matches the magnitude of the global climate crisis. As talks enter their final stages at the United Nations Conference of the Parties 21, we've been protesting, speaking on panels, and working with media to elevate the message that we must have faster, bigger, bolder actions than anything proposed so far.

In particular we've been calling on world leaders to keep fossil fuels in the ground, as well as to include the aviation sector as a crucial source of emissions when considering CO2 reductions. We also hounded California Gov. Jerry Brown with a very public message: If he's serious about being a climate leader, he needs to show it back home by halting fracking and dangerous oil drilling.

World leaders haven't yet embraced the ambitious, legally binding climate agreements we truly need. But momentum is growing, and during the Paris summit (and long after), the Center will keep pushing for real action to avert climate chaos.

Learn more and follow our live Twitter feed at our webpage To Paris and Beyond.

'Water Hog' Project Highlights Water Waste's Impacts on Wildlife

A new Center education campaign, in partnership with Levi Strauss & Co., encourages people to save water for wildlife by identifying the nation's top water-hogging counties and U.S. households' most wasteful water-use activities. Our "Don't Be a Drip" website is geared toward raising awareness about how water consumption affects endangered species.

The campaign website includes an interactive map of high water-use counties -- the majority of which are in California, though Arizona's Maricopa County (Phoenix) is No. 1 -- and an infographic showing the water footprint of common household activities.

"It's easy to forget that every time you turn on the tap, that water is coming from rivers, lakes and streams that wildlife depend on," said Stephanie Feldstein, the Center's population and sustainability director. "The reality is that water is a finite resource, and careless human water consumption is altering our ecosystems, destroying natural habitats and sapping water sources for birds, fish, mammals and other wildlife."

Check out the new Don't Be a Drip website.