The ART OF LAND project - Salt pattern, Lake Eyre National Park, South Australia Lake Eyre NP SA - Steve Parish photography
The ART OF LAND project - Devils Marbles Conservation Reserve NT - Steve Parish photography
The ART OF LAND project - Kimberley country
Cape Leveque WA coast - Steve Parish photography
Oops, 5000 acres of your land cleared for palm oil. Sorry.
A subsidiary of agribusiness giant Cargill has paid a $1 million fine for clearing land for oil palm outside its concession, a move that could serve as an important example for palm oil developers operating in Indonesia, according to Greenomics-Indonesia, a Jakarta-based environmental group.
The fine was levied on Cargill subsidiary PT Hindoli after the company notified local authorities and the Ministry of Forestry that it had accidentally cleared about 2,000 hectares of land beyond the boundary of its formally licensed area in South Sumatra Province. The clearing, which took place in 2005, involved agricultural land that was still zoned as “forest” by the Ministry of Forestry even though it lacked exploitable timber.
Read more:http://news.mongabay.com/2012/0223-hindoli_fine_palm_oil.html#ixzz1nZ1Fkkx4
Sharks Eating Songbirds in the Gulf of Mexico
by Rachel Kaufman
What’s a songbird doing in the belly of a tiger shark?
The predators are eating land birds affected by offshore oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico (map), according to new research. Marcus Drymon, of Dauphin Island Sea Lab, has been studying fish off the Alabama coast since 2006. During a routine sampling in 2009, he pulled a tiger shark onto the deck of his boat to tag and release it.
“He coughed up some feathers,” Drymon said.
That in itself wasn’t unusual, he said. Tiger sharks in other parts of the world are known to eat marine birds. But once Drymon analyzed the feathers in the lab, he was fairly sure they had come from a terrestrial bird. So Drymon and his team launched a project to study the sharks’ diets. Over two years the team caught 50 tiger sharks—mostly within 5 to 10 miles (8 to 16 kilometers) offshore—and dissected their stomachs.
In about half of the sharks, Drymon found “feathers, or beaks, or bird feet, or some kind of bird part.” All the parts were later found to originate from land birds such as woodpeckers, tanagers, and meadowlarks…
(read more: National Geo) (image: Brian Skerry)
