Archive for the "N. Myers" Category

  • Predicting diversity within hotspots to enhance conservation

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  • Symposium tackles big question: how many species will survive our generation

    An overview of the Smithsonian’s Symposium: “Will the rainforests survive? New Threats and Realities in the Tropical Extinction Crisis” Nine scientists dusted off their crystal balls Monday at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC, weighing in on the future of the world’s tropical forest. Despite the most up-to-date statistics, prognosis for the future of tropical forests varied widely. More

  • Taboo Talk in Business: Buy Less Stuff

    Talking to consumers about buying less stuff just might be the third rail of green marketing. Reducing or limiting consumption is antithetical to marketing, or at least it has been so far. Practically no one seems to want to go there. I'll accept my portion of responsibility. In the late 1980s, when I penned The Green Consumer, I helped advance the notion of solving our planet's environmental ills by making good purchasing choices -- that we could, in other words, shop our way to environmental health. "By choosing carefully, you can have a positive impact on the environment without significantly

  • Oro azul versus oro amarillo

    Garantizar un mejor acceso y control de los recursos naturales, es fundamental para lograr un desarrollo humano y sostenible.Los glaciares, el “oro azul” no solo son, una atracción turística, o un escenario exótico para desfiles de modelos, sino uno de los tantos servicios que la naturaleza brinda, pero que no se contabilizan en el cálculo del producto bruto interno (PBI). More

  • Parents proud of Olympic heroine

    Mara Yamauchi, the Oxford woman who matched the best ever finish for a Briton in the Olympic marathon, was only five when she fell in love with the Games. Her proud father Norman Myers recalls catching her standing on a coffee table imagining she was receiving an Olympic medal. Three decades later, while missing out on a medal, she came sixth in the marathon in Beijing on Sunday. Dr Myers, from Headington, said: "I remember Mara being very young and she was fascinated by the Olympics. more

  • Wildlife Conservation 2.0

    A new software-based approach may be the key to saving thousands of species. by Erika Check Hayden Aquatic wildlife of the Great Barrier Reef gets a boost from Marxan software Nothing pushes a species to extinction like wiping out its habitat. Consider the Hawaiian Islands: They were originally covered in trees, but by the 1950s three-quarters of the islands’ natural forests had been destroyed to make way for animal pastures and crops. Many other habitats were overrun by introduced pigs and rats. The effect on Hawaii’s indigenous species was devastating: In the last 200 years, 28 species of birds alone

  • Climate change overwhelming? Consider the mosquito

    LONDON, April 29 (Reuters Life!) - Are you feeling overwhelmed by the enormity of global warming and battered by the constant stream of warnings about coming calamity? Oxford University professor Norman Myers has a message that might help you square your shoulders and face the future. "If you feel you are too small to make a difference then you haven't been in bed with a mosquito," Myers said.

  • Asia’s rainforests vanishing as timber, food demand surge

    HANOI (AFP) — Asia's rainforests are being rapidly destroyed, a trend accelerated by surging timber demand in booming China and India, and record food, energy and commodity prices, forest experts warn. The loss of these biodiversity hot spots, much of it driven by the illegal timber trade and the growth of oil palm, biofuel and rubber plantations, is worsening global warming, species loss and poverty, they said. Globally, tropical forest destruction "is a super crisis we are facing, it's an appalling crisis," said Oxford University's Professor Norman Myers, keynote speaker at the Asia-Pacific Forestry Week conference in

  • What will we do when the last tree has died, the last river poisoned…?

    How would you define the significance of water in the current global context? There is this increasing realisation that conflicts and wars over water are on the increase in villages, between states and countries.  More

  • The Pill as Pollutant

    A really inconvenient truth. By Iain Murray In 2002, thanks to soccer star David Beckham, the world was introduced to the “metrosexual.” Two years later, and with less mainstream-media attention, we got our first exposure to “Intersex.” Intersex is not some new perversion or a weird combination of science fiction and pornography. It is an unfortunate condition that is affecting freshwater fish all over the developed world. It occurs when fish of one sex also exhibit sexual characteristics of the other

  • Farewell, Fellow Travellers

    By Tom Turner June 17, 1987, is not a date most people will remember for long. On that day, the last dusky seaside sparrow in the world was found dead of old age in its cage in Florida. His species had fallen victim to the space program, a mosquito-abatement project, fire and Walt Disney World. It is the latest species to be declared

  • Wealthy Nations Should Take “Climate Justice” Seriously – FoE

    Internationally renowned environmental scientist Professor Norman Myers suggests through his research that displacement due to climate change is inevitable if nothing is done to slow global warming. Read more

  • Tougher CO2 Emissions Cuts Urged

    The current chairman Sir John Lawton and predecessors Sir Tom Blundell and Sir John Houghton, together with Foreign Member of the US National Academy of Sciences Professor Norman Myers say the 60% goal for carbon emissions is based on out-of-date science. More here

  • Friend and Collaborator Norman Myers picked by Time Magazine as a Hero of the Environment

    Working as a wildlife photographer in Kenya's game reserves in the 1960s, Norman Myers would idle away the days' hottest hours — when lions and elephants rested — by reading up on biology. He soon began to wonder why none of his books gave good estimates of the rate at which species were going extinct. So he did the calculation himself. While conservationists of the day guessed that the planet might be losing one species per year, Myers' research in the early 1970s revealed that the rate was probably closer to one