Year Of The Tiger~The Reason To Save The Endangered Species

WWF's Year of the Tiger Vid

Engineers Removing Cap From Gulf Well? -Yahoo.com

By HARRY R. WEBER, Associated Press Writer Harry R. Weber, Associated Press Writer – Fri Aug 27, 5:08 pm ET



NEW ORLEANS – Engineers will soon start the delicate work of detaching the temporary cap that stopped oil from gushing from BP's blown-out Gulf of Mexico well and the hulking device that failed to prevent the leak — all while trying to avoid more damage to the environment.






Retired Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, the government's point man for the spill response, told reporters Friday that engineers will remove the cap starting Monday so they can raise the failed blowout preventer. The blowout preventer is considered a key piece of evidence in determining what caused the April rig explosion that unleashed the gushing oil.






The leak was first contained when engineers were able to place a cap atop BP's well. Workers then pumped mud and cement in through the top in a so-called "static kill" operation that significantly reduced pressure inside the well. Officials don't expect oil to leak into the sea again when the cap is removed, but Allen has ordered BP to be ready to collect any leaking crude just in case.






The Department of Justice and other federal investigators are overseeing the work to remove the blowout preventer, Allen said. The 50-foot, 600,000-pound device — which was designed to prevent such a catastrophe — will be taken out of the water with the well pipe still inside to ensure the pipe doesn't break apart any more than it already has.






Keeping the blowout preventer intact is important because it's considered an essential piece of evidence in determining what caused the blast aboard the Deepwater Horizon on April 20. After the explosion, 206 million gallons of oil spilled into the Gulf of Mexico until the temporary cap stopped the flow. The explosion on the rig — which was owned by Transocean Ltd. and being operated by BP PLC — killed 11 workers.






Work to lift the blowout preventer is extremely difficult and delicate — all happening a mile underwater. Engineers must take care not to raise the central casing of the well and a casing seal. They also may have to carefully free the blowout preventer from any hanging drill pipe.






Raising the device may require as much as 80,000 pounds of pressure, Allen said.






A new blowout preventer will be placed atop the well once the one that failed is raised. After that, the goal is to drill the final 50 feet of a relief well beginning Sept. 7, which will take about four days, Allen said.






The relief well has been called the ultimate solution to plugging the well that blew out. Once the relief well is drilled, engineers will be able to pump in mud and cement to permanently plug the well that gushed oil.






Meanwhile, the U.S. government said Friday that it is reopening more federal waters in the Gulf of Mexico for commercial and recreational fishing that had been closed because of the spill. The government is reopening 4,281 square miles of waters off the coast of western Louisiana.






Oil sheen has not been seen there since July 29, and scientists found no oil or dispersants on samples of the area's shrimp and finfish.






Twenty percent of federal waters in the Gulf remain closed.






The news came as the joint U.S. Coast Guard-Bureau of Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement investigative panel wrapped up five days of hearings. On Friday, Mark Hafle — a BP drilling engineer who was a key decision maker at the now-sunken rig — exercised his constitutional right to refuse to testify.






The panel's goal is to determine what caused the explosion. The panel also will make recommendations to prevent such a catastrophe in the future. It will reconvene in October and hold one more session after that.






___






Associated Press Writer Ramit Plushnick-Masti contributed to this report from Houston.


Information From: Yahoo

Live Tiger found In Luggage

Bangkok, Thailand. August 26, 2010 - A two-month-old tiger cub was found sedated and hidden among stuffed-tiger toys in the luggage of a woman at Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi International Airport on Sunday.

The 31-year-old Thai national was scheduled to board a Mahan Air flight destined for Iran when she had trouble checking in her oversized bag.

Airports of Thailand (AOT) staff suspected something amiss when they scanned the bag and x-ray images showed an item resembling a real cat.

Officers from the Livestock Development Department and the National Parks, Wildlife and Plant Conservation Department were then called in to open the bag for inspection and discovered the tranquilized cub.

Investigations are underway to determine if the cub was wild caught or captive-bred, where it came from and the suspect’s intended final destination.

The cub is being cared for at the Rescue Center of the Department of National Parks, Wildlife and Plant Conservation. DNA samples will be sent to the tiger enclosure at Khaopratab Wildlife Rescue Center in Ratchaburi Province, to determine which subspecies the cub belongs to, which will help determine its origin.

Tiger populations in Thailand and throughout Asia are critically threatened by poaching and trade to meet the international demand for tiger parts, products and, as illustrated in this case, live tigers.

Tigers are categorized as Endangered species by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN Red List of Threatened Species) and listed under Appendix I of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) prohibiting international commercial trade. Both captive and wild caught tigers fall under the same regulations.

The ASEAN Wildlife Enforcement Network, sponsored by the US Agency for International Development recently held a training course on Wildlife Trade Regulation at Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi International Airport.

Many of the agencies who were involved in the case had attended that course and work in close co-operation under Thailand’s own Wildlife Enforcement Network.

“We applaud all the agencies that came together to uncover this brazen smuggling attempt,” said Chris R. Shepherd, TRAFFIC Southeast Asia’s Deputy Regional Director.

“TRAFFIC is glad to see these training programs pay off in seizures, arrests and continued vigilance at the airport especially by the Department of National Parks, Wildlife and Plant Conservation.”

However, Shepherd also cautioned that this case demonstrated a real need for constant monitoring and tougher penalties.

“If people are trying to smuggle live tigers in their check-in luggage, they obviously think wildlife smuggling is something easy to get away with and do not fear reprimand.

“Only sustained pressure on wildlife traffickers and serious penalties can change that.”

Learn more:

•Wildlife Trade

•TRAFFIC

•Tigers

 

 

 

 

 

 

Copied from WWF

Genesis 1:20-22

Then God said, "Let the waters swarm with fish and other life. Let the skies be filled with birds of every kind." So God created great sea creatures and every living thing that scurries and swarms in the water, and every sort of bird . . .And God saw that is was good.

Africa's Disappearing Forests: E-Mail From WFF

In this Issue: Waves of Deforestation Major Victory for Arctic \Defend


Conservation Funding
Shop Next Week to Help WWF






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CONSERVATION RESULTS






Waves of Deforestation Ripple Across East Africa






Imagine waves of forest degradation advancing like ripples in a pond; that's


exactly what has happened across 75 miles in East Africa in just 14 years.


Scientists from 12 organizations in Europe, Africa and the U.S. recently


demonstrated that forest exploitation begins with the removal of the most


valuable products first, such as timber for export, followed by the extraction


of less valuable products, such as low value timber and charcoal. More findings


from this report.


http://wwf.worldwildlife.org/site/R?i=jU5GJKOaiYwR82Ex0X38MQ..






More on Forests

- Why forests are vital to life on Earth


http://wwf.worldwildlife.org/site/R?i=GkgFa8YX9UqJO3_jRup0zw..


- What you can do for forests


http://wwf.worldwildlife.org/site/R?i=_7rz4cM4McYSzfq-bDkfHQ..


- The 2,900 miles of Coastal East Africa


http://wwf.worldwildlife.org/site/R?i=Z5engM4ZfPiiJAD_l7FMLQ..










Major Victory for Arctic






WWF's long campaign to protect Alaska's Arctic seas and coastlines from oil and


gas development won a major victory at the end of July when a federal court put


a hold on recent leases that would have opened up the Chukchi Sea to new


drilling. Read more about this important win for the species and communities


along Alaska's North Slope.


http://wwf.worldwildlife.org/site/R?i=hJ2mC_GOpmodsCS9-FMUtg..

Chief Standing Bear's Quote: How People Connect With The Earth

  "[They]. . . loved the earth and all the things of the earth. . . To sit or lie upon the ground is to be able to think more deeply and to feel more keenly; . . . to see more clearly into the mysteries of life and come closer to kinship to. . . all creatures of the earth, sky, and water."

    -Chief Standing Bear,
exerpt from Pretice Hall World Cultures; A Global Mosaic

Quotes To Meditate On:

• We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children. ~Native American Proverb
• Newspapers: dead trees with information smeared on them. ~Horizon, "Electronic Frontier"
• We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect. ~Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac
• The earth we abuse and the living things we kill will, in the end, take their revenge; for in exploiting their presence we are diminishing our future. ~Marya Mannes, More in Anger, 1958
• I am the earth. You are the earth. The Earth is dying. You and I are murderers. ~Ymber Delecto
• So bleak is the picture... that the bulldozer and not the atomic bomb may turn out to be the most destructive invention of the 20th century. ~Philip Shabecoff, New York Times Magazine, 4 June 1978
• Economic advance is not the same thing as human progress. ~John Clapham, A Concise Economic History of Britain, 1957
• Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them. ~Bill Vaughn
• For 200 years we've been conquering Nature. Now we're beating it to death. ~Tom McMillan, quoted in Francesca Lyman, The Greenhouse Trap, 1990
• I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority. ~Elwyn Brooks White, Essays of E.B. White, 1977
• The insufferable arrogance of human beings to think that Nature was made solely for their benefit, as if it was conceivable that the sun had been set afire merely to ripen men's apples and head their cabbages. ~Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac, États et empires de la lune, 1656
• Oh Beautiful for smoggy skies, insecticided grain, For strip-mined mountain's majesty above the asphalt plain. America, America, man sheds his waste on thee, And hides the pines with billboard signs, from sea to oily sea. ~George Carlin
• A human being is part of the whole, called by us "Universe," a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest - a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole [of] nature in its beauty. ~Albert Einstein, 1950
• Our children may save us if they are taught to care properly for the planet; but if not, it may be back to the Ice Age or the caves from where we first emerged. Then we'll have to view the universe above from a cold, dark place. No more jet skis, nuclear weapons, plastic crap, broken pay phones, drugs, cars, waffle irons, or television. Come to think of it, that might not be a bad idea. ~Jimmy Buffet, Mother Earth News, March-April 1990
• We shall continue to have a worsening ecologic crisis until we reject the Christian axiom that nature has no reason for existence save to serve man. ~Lynn White, Jr., "The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis," 1967
• In an underdeveloped country, don't drink the water; in a developed country, don't breathe the air. ~Changing Times magazine
• To people who think of themselves as God's houseguests, American enterprise must seem arrogant beyond belief. Or stupid. A nation of amnesiacs, proceeding as if there were no other day but today. Assuming the land could also forget what had been done to it. ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
• '"It has to do with keeping things in balance. It's like the spirits have made a deal with us. We're on our own. The spirits have been good enough to let us live here and use the utilities, and we're saying: We know how nice you're being. We appreciate the rain, we appreciate the sun, we appreciate the deer we took. Sorry if we messed up anything. You've gone to a lot of trouble, and we'll try to be good guests."
  ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
• Zoos are becoming facsimiles - or perhaps caricatures - of how animals once were in their natural habitat. If the right policies toward nature were pursued, we would need no zoos at all. ~Michael Fox, Sierra, November-December 1990
• Our modern industrial economy takes a mountain covered with trees, lakes, running streams and transforms it into a mountain of junk, garbage, slime pits, and debris. ~Edward Abbey
  
  
  
  

Change

  "Okay! I admit it. I haven't always done the right thing. But it's time to change my ways and make the full transformation from an egocentric consumer to an environmentally friendly citizen. I want to walk a lighter footprint on the earth, but there's so many things to think about. It's so easy to live a wasteful existence, and in order to change the ways I do things I will have to go against the widely accepted "norm". I will start to think about everyday decisions in a whole new way. And by writing about it, I will force myself to be more conscious of the choices I make and try a little harder to make a difference in my own little way."

  ~Leenie Green