News of the Wild
Get the latest animal news
Good Environment Means Good Economy
After studying the relationship between environmental regulations and the economy in the Pacific Northwest, 34 economists from colleges and universities in the region have concluded that no difficult choices must be made there between jobs and the environment. "Quite the opposite," says their report. "A healthy environment is a major stimulus for a healthy economy." People want to live and work in the region, says the report, largely because they perceive that its natural resources add to their quality of life.
Although the past decade has brought significant job declines in natural-resource industries such as timber, fishing and mining, the Pacific Northwest's economy is booming. Growth in the region is two to three times the national rate as measured by earnings, personal income and number of jobs. This trend will continue for the foreseeable future, the study says.
"The region is successfully navigating from being dependent on a few extractive industries to having a modern, widely diversified income," the study says. "The highest value use of a forest, river or other resource will be to protect and enhance it, because this will strengthen one set of forces that is creating jobs and higher incomes."
The study was funded by the Pacific Rivers Council, a nonprofit group in Eugene, Oregon.
35 Years Ago
President John F. Kennedy dedicated the National Wildlife Federation's new headquarters building in Washington, D.C., during ceremonies on March 4, 1961. That same year, NWF amended its bylaws to allow individuals to join the Federation.
For their dues, these Associate Members would receive a new magazine: National Wildlife. By the time the first issue rolled off the presses in December 1962, more than 65,000 people had joined NWF.
Call It Animal Magnetism
Every year, sea turtles perform remarkable feats of navigation, swimming across thousands of miles of trackless sea to return to the very beaches on which they hatched. How they manage these trips has long baffled scientists, but research by two biologists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill seems on the verge of solving the mystery.
Two years ago, Kenneth and Catherine Lohmann discovered that baby loggerhead sea turtles could determine latitude at sea by reading the Earth's magnetic field. Now, in more recent experiments, the two turtle experts have found that the reptiles also can monitor magnetic field intensity, which corresponds roughly with longitude. "Our work shows sea turtles indeed possess the minimal sensory abilities necessary to approximate global position using a bicoordinate magnetic map," says Kenneth Lohmann, adding that more research is needed to confirm the findings.
Share
