Subject:  Viridian Note OOO55:  Biodiversity Maps

Key concepts:  maps, web, species counts, biodiversity, 
wildlife refuges

Attention Conservation Notice:   If you click on the
National Geographic website you might find yourself
wandering around in there for hours.

Links:
http://tectonic.nationalgeographic.com/2000/biodiversity/m
aps/

Entries in the Viridian Teakettle Design Contest:
http://www.stewarts.org/users/stewarts/teakettle.html
http://www.dnai.com/~catnhat/teapots.htm
http://www.interlog.com/~shamann/
http://www.powerbase-alpha.com/bigmike/teakettle.html
http://www.altguides.com/teapot/
http://www.well.com/conf/mirrorshades/viridian/olga.html

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This contest is now closed.  A winner will be announced 
shortly.
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From: Rich Young (richyoung@hotbot.com^^^*)

Rich Young remarks: 

Thought you'd like this site:
http://tectonic.nationalgeographic.com/2000/biodiversity/m
aps/

Track the dwindling species count in YOUR neighborhood!  
Fun for the whole family!   Compare regional counts of 
various types of flora and fauna!

(((bruces remarks:  Here's a laudable effort.  It has 
crude little interactive web-maps, you can zoom in on them 
a bit, you can scroll around in them, and you can bear 
witness to the appalling devastation suffered by North 
America's amphibians, birds, butterflies, crayfish, 
fishes, mammals, reptiles, snails, tiger beetles, unionid 
mussels and vascular plants.

    (((The difficulty with a display of this kind is that 
it tells the same story every time.  We're always 
presented with fragile ecosystems, crumbling refuges, 
dwindling herds of the blue-tongued mango vole.  The 
public has been trained into a sense of learned 
helplessness by seventy years of anguished nature 
documentaries.  For the sake of breaking up the trance, 
there should have been one or two maps showing *expanding* 
ranges for natural organisms in today's environment.  
Zebra mussels, crabgrass and anopheles mosquitoes leap to 
mind, as do domestic fleas, Asian cockroaches and walking 
catfish.

    (((The defenders of wildlife seem to be stuck in a 
permanent defensive posture, crying out monotonously as 
the blows rain down.  One tires of this defeatist, refugee 
mentality.  We should make a mighty effort to visualize 
something else, something better.   Perhaps we'll live to 
see a *beachhead* mentality of *newly-established* 
wildlife areas. What would it take to build a wildlife 
refuge from scratch, right in the midst of the urban, 
built-up environment of the 21st century?  One wonders, 
for instance, what a high-rise grasslands might look like: 
say, an urban structure the size of the Chrysler Building 
where buffalo and antelope migrate via elevator.  
Furthermore: having witnessed this big continental 
National Geographic biodiversity map, I'm eager to see the 
personal version, one for my own lawn, where I can do 
soemthing direct, constructive and immediate about the 
life and death of organisms.)))

Rich Young (richyoung@hotbot.com^^^*)