Environmentalists press Obama administration to put a halt to BP’s ‘burn fields’ to dispose of oil from the Gulf spill

Endangered sea turtles and other marine creatures are being corralled into 500 square-mile “burn fields” and burnt alive in operations intended to contain oil from BP’s ruptured well in the Gulf of Mexico, the Obama administration confirmed today.

The killing of the turtles – which once teetered on the brink of extinction – has outraged environmentalists and could put BP into even deeper legal jeopardy.

Environmental organisations are demanding that the oil company stop blocking rescue of the turtles, and are pressing the US administration to halt the burning and look at prosecuting BP and its contractors for killing endangered species during the cleanup operation. Harming or killing a sea turtle carries fines of up to $50,000 (£33,000).

“It is criminal and cruel and they need to be held accountable,” said Carole Allen, Gulf office director of the Sea Turtle Restoration Project. “There should not be another lighting of a fire of any kind till people have gone in there and looked for turtles.”

The Obama administration, confirming the kills, said BP was under orders to avoid the turtles. “My understanding is that protocols include looking for wildlife prior to igniting of oil,” a spokeswoman for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) said. “We take these things very seriously.”

The agency this week posted a single turtle spotter on the burn vessels, but government scientists are pressing for more wildlife experts to try to rescue the animals before the oil is lit – or at the very least to give them access to the burn fields.

“One can’t just ride through an area where they are burning and expect to be safe while looking for turtles. We don’t expect that, but we would like to access those areas where we suspect there may be turtles,” said Blair Witherington, a sea turtle research scientist at Florida’s Fish and Wildlife Research Institute.

More than 425 turtles are known to have died in the spill zone since 30 April, Noaa said.

Conservationists say the losses could imperil the long-term survival of the creatures. All five species of turtles found in the Gulf are endangered or threatened: the Kemp’s Ridley most of all.

But in a video posted on YouTube, Mike Ellis, a skipper from Venice, Louisiana, accuses BP of chasing away a boat of conservationists trying to rescue turtles caught in the oil and weed a few miles away from the leak.

“They ran us out of there and then they shut us down,” said Ellis.

On days when the weather is fine and there is relatively no wind, BP conducts up to a dozen “controlled burns”, torching vast expanses of the ocean surface within a corral of fireproof booms.

Biologists say such burns are deadly for young turtles because oil and sargassum – the seaweed mats that provide nutrients to jellyfish and a range of other creatures – – congregate in the same locations. The sargassum is also a perfect hunting ground for young sea turtles, who are not developed enough to dive to the ocean floor to forage for food.

Once BP moves in, the turtles are doomed. “They drag a boom between two shrimp boats and whatever gets caught between the two boats, they circle it up and catch it on fire. Once the turtles are in there, they can’t get out,” Ellis said.

The heartbreak for conservationists is that the convergence of sargassum and oil offers the best chance of finding young turtles before they suffocate on the crude. But it can also be deadly.

“When they breathe and come to the surface, they get a mouthful and a bellyful of toxic substance that is very much like wallpaper paste,” said John Hewitt, the director of husbandry at the New Orleans aquarium. “If we don’t remove them and clean them up, in three or four days that probably spells the end of the turtle.”

Since the spill, the aquarium has taken in 90 sea turtles, scrubbing the oil off their shells with toothbrushes and washing-up liquid.

Even before the fires, the two-month gusher in the Gulf of Mexico was threatening the long-term survival of sea turtles.

“This is the worst calamity that I have ever seen for sea turtles,” said David Godfrey, executive director of the Sea Turtle Conservancy. “This is really the cradle of sea turtle reproduction for the western hemisphere.”The threat to the turtles could continue well after the gusher is capped. The oil spill is turning vast expanses of the Gulf into a dead zone, killing off the jellyfish, crabs and conches that are the staples of an adult diet.

Conservationists are also worried about the survival of the next generation of loggerhead turtles, which are about to climb up on to badly oiled shorelines to begin their nesting season. “They are doomed” said Godfrey.

Godfrey said his organisation was working on plans to dig up about 1,000 nests, or 100,000 eggs, from nesting grounds in the Florida Panhandle and transfer them to hatcheries for safekeeping. “It is a last gasp measure to save 100,000 young sea turtles,” he said. “We need every one of these turtles to survive.”

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As the Olympic torch continues its journey through Canada’s north, some scientists are hoping it will shine an international light on the plight of the country’s iconic mammal – the polar bear. Environmentalists warn the symbol of the North is in grave danger because of climate change, yet neither Canadians, nor anyone from the international community has proposed anything concrete to save them.

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Rough and out-of-bounds areas of golf courses can offer unexpected sanctuary to wildlife, says the conservation group

Mark Twain called it a good walk spoiled. But the game of golf is often accused of wrecking more than the mood of its participants. With heavily watered fairways and greens saturated with weed-killing chemicals, the sport has become a symbol of environmental wastefulness and an apparent conservation disaster.

Now, the RSPB aims to change that view and wants to recruit Britain’s 2,600 golf courses to the fight to save rare species. The rough and out-of-bounds areas of golf courses can offer unexpected sanctuary to wildlife, it says. Together with the R&A, golf’s governing body, the conservation group has published a handbook to help course greenkeepers think of a different kind of birdie.

“Golf courses may have gained a bad reputation, perhaps not always justified, among environmentalists in the past, but that is changing,” said Nigel Symes of the RSPB. “The truth is that every golf course has potential to be a sanctuary for wildlife, and to provide an important stepping stone for birds and other animals whose habitat is under threat. While researching this report we have come across a lot of inspiring examples of golf clubs which are doing really great things for wildlife.”

There are 140,000 hectares of suitable rough and out-of-bounds areas across UK golf courses, about the same as that covered by the RSPB’s reserves combined.

Steve Isaac of the R&A, which takes its name from The Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews, said: “There has been a growing awareness over the past decade or so in the sport that courses need to do more for wildlife. While there are some greenkeepers who put more water and pesticides on their courses than we would like, there are many golf clubs who are managing habitats for wildlife on their land.”

The RSPB highlighted Royal Troon golf club in Ayrshire, which has surveyed populations of breeding birds including skylark and linnet, and manages the course around them. Hankley Common in Surrey has rare nightjar, woodlark and Dartford warbler, while several courses in the Highlands are one of the best places to spot the Scottish crossbill, the only bird species unique to Britain.

There were even a pair of eagles on a golf course in Mull this summer, with white-tailed eagles nesting next to a fairway. Albatrosses remain rare on British courses, a RSPB spokesman confirmed.

Alan Gange, a biologist at Royal Holloway, University of London, has studied golf course wildlife and says the common public perception of them as bad for the environment is unfair. “The problem is that people compare them with pristine habitat when they should really ask what would be there if the golf course wasn’t, which is usually farmland.” Only about 40% of a typical course is actually played on, he says. “Yet that is the bit that people see 99% of the time when they watch golf on television.”

Lorne Smith of the Fine Golf campaign blames “pressure from less discriminating golfers” for many courses switching away from traditional grasses that need less water and chemicals. “If all you see on television is lush, green fairways with crisscross mown fairways then you’re going to want your home course to look like that.”

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As the U.S. Senate prepares to debate its own climate change legislation, a chorus of politicians, businesses, environmentalists, and scientists is uniting to request that U.S. climate policy help tropical nations in Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia protect their forests. Known as the Commission on Climate and Tropical Forests, the group suggests that U.S. cap-and-trade legislation raise an annual $5 billion and $9 billion in public and private investments, respectively. Without forestry offsets, comparable domestic emissions reductions would cost the U.S. economy an additional $50 billion by 2020, the group estimates.

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The conservation community is looking increasingly out of touch, overshadowed by climate change concerns. The Open Ground, a public event in London, hopes to confront the problem head-on

Asked to rank the world’s most pressing problems, many people would probably mention familiar things: economic recession, poverty, terrorism, war or disease. Perhaps climate change would be on the list of many readers of this blog. One thing would almost certainly be absent from most lists, though: biodiversity loss.

How much does the loss of a few barely known species matter in the grand scheme of things? Not much, you might think – and perhaps you’re right. Look out of the window and things seem to be going on pretty much as normal, don’t they?

Most scientists would respond with a resounding no. Species are disappearing faster than usual – 30,000 a year according to E.O. Wilson’s estimate back in 1993, a rate 100 to 1,000 times faster than the background extinction rate. This is tragic, but the statistics tend to obscure the important messages.

For example, the loss of some species has more far-reaching consequences than the loss of others. Harvesting “keystone species” – which have a disproportionately large effect on the environment relative to their abundance – can lead to the collapse of marine and rainforest ecosystems. And deforestation doesn’t only ruin the lives of indigenous tribes but disrupts water cycles, leading to drought and crop failures thousands of miles away.

These are just two of hundreds of examples. We live in a globalised world, both economically and ecologically. Everyone understands the first part, but few realise the truth of the second.

The problem is this: conservationists are not making themselves heard. While climate change has become the topic du jour for environmentalists and greenwashing companies alike, the conservation community is looking increasingly out of touch. When they do make the headlines it is with yet more biodiversity bad news, such as the loss in 2007 of the baiji, the Yangtze River dolphin.

How can we address this imbalance, and, more importantly, what is the way forward for conservation?

This weekend, a group of scientists, activists, poets, journalists and economists are meeting to discuss and debate these questions. Some of them – such as Sam Turvey of the Zoological Society of London and author of Witness to Extinction, which chronicled his team’s doomed efforts to save the baiji – think that scientists need to get better at learning from their past failures. For others such as Sea Shepherd, a buccaneering team of ship-sinking marine activists, direct action is the way forward.

What about the cute-and-fluffies, the flagship species? Is it time to give up on the panda and Siberian tiger in favour of a more pragmatic, economic-style approach? Or do aesthetic pleas for saving nature, such as those espoused by poet Ruth Padel, author of Tigers in Red Weather, still hold water? Maybe we should concentrate on the as-yet undiscovered species, as writer Caspar Henderson believes. Who knows how many life-saving Amazonian plants might be on the verge of extinction?

Perhaps the answer is an Intergovernmental Panel on Conservation, bringing all these disparate factions into a coherent whole. We’re not sure. But we do know that we need your help. Whatever your background, we want to know what you think needs to be done. Join us as we head for The Open Ground on Saturday (and leave your comments below). The fate of the Earth’s biodiversity isn’t the sole preserve of scientists – it is in all of our hands.

The Open Ground, an event organised by Conservation Today will be held at Bash Studios, 65 Scrutton Street, London EC2A 4PJ, near Old Street tube, on Saturday June 20 from 10am. The day will consist of talks, interactive panel debates, and a Royal Society of Arts exhibition. Tickets are £10 (£7 concessions) and lunch is included. Please go to www.conservationtoday.org for more information and to book your ticket.

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