Would you mind awfully sending it again?
I just logged on to find 1131 comments waiting for me to moderate — most of them about the benefits and drawbacks of taking various addictive prescription medications. A few about Britney Spears.
Much appreciated.
Extinctions aren’t textbook facts and figures; they’re events we watch happen right before our eyes. Welcome to the new millennium.
Fifteen years ago, there were as many as 500 spotted owls in British Columbia forests–still a perilously small number, but a number with hope.
Today, there are 17. And the chances that those few will find each other and and mate successfully–given the stresses of constant logging and habitat destruction–are even slimmer than they seem.
There is a term biologists use to describe an animal that still has a physical presence on the planet, but is no longer viable as a species: biologically dead.
BC’s government has put its [almost negligible] efforts into a captive breeding program for the owls, rather than focusing on habitat protection. The mistake here is that it doesn’t matter how many owls there are, if they don’t have enough of the territory–both in terms of size of territory and age of genuine old-growth forest–they need in order to thrive. It’s just possible that the government’s “save the owl” program will be what renders it biologically dead.
To read more about BC’s beautiful and endangered spotted owls:
Click here for a recent article in the Tyee.
Click here to learn about Melanie Jackson’s Dinah Galloway Mystery Series, particularly The Summer of the Spotted Owl.
Click here for info about Karen Dudley’s spotted-owl-centred mystery, Hoot to Kill.
And then write the Premiere, would you? You and your whole class. Your whole school. Your district. Organize a Save the Spotted Owl letter-writing campaign. Flood the parliament buildings with your mail.
I’ll be watching for the news story.
Author Steven Kellert (The Value of Life, Island Press, 1996) lists 10 categories to describe the wide variation in human attitudes toward animals. Check out my latest “Animal Instinct” column in the Burnaby NOW to find out which category best describes you!
Special thanks to Michelle and Rocky, Teenie, Josie, Marni, Anne, Sharon, Dr. Reid Danielsen, Dr. David Fraser and my book publisher Robert McCullough for the information and connections they provided and for the stories and photos they shared.
Thanks, too, to Buddy and Joan for greatly enhancing my words with their sweet faces, and to Rupert, Bailey and Trilogy for their “tails,” all of which I used.
I just received a communications brief from the Vancouver Humane Society (VHS) in the mail, and it gave me the perfect topic for a back-to-school post.
This October, VHS’s Power of One is sponsoring a humane education workshop for educators. Presented by the Humane Education Institute, the workshop has been designed to help teachers create effective and transformative humane education programs that will give students the insight they need to make informed choices that promote a more humane world.
I had the good fortune to encounter Lesley Fox, The Power of One’s coordinator, last October, just after I had left Vancouver for Toronto. We “met” by phone, long distance, and spoke for well over an hour, sharing our passion for the issues that drive us and our excitement about the possibilities for change. Lesley is an experienced, well informed, and intensely committed campaigner and educator, and I can’t recommend her in-school presentations, highly enough. They’re free, so take advantage of this opportunity to connect with an expert in the field, and someone who can make the lessons of social justice, environmental stewardship and humane education real and personal for your students.
Lesley has become one of Jane Ray’s Wildlife Rescue Series’s biggest fans, and has shown her support by including books in kits that went out to every high school library in the Vancouver School District, as well as by featuring a review of Flight or Fight in a VHS newsletter. She’s hoping the series will reach 150 books (”like Babysitter’s Club!” she says); I keep telling her I’m averaging not quite one book a year so far, and that all the Botox in the world isn’t going to keep my career going that long. But she’s an optimist.
And in a world that often treats humans like animals, and animals like objects, optimism is one of our best weapons.
Click here for more details about the workshop, and to register online.
Click here to read an unusual yet heartwarming story of animal rescue on Vancouver Island.
Huge thanks to the builders, BC’s Transportation Ministry and the volunteers who’ve helped over a million toadlets survive their migration across the Island Highway!