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The Age of Human Arrogance
For most of human history, we lived as one species among many. We shared forests with elephants, rivers with hippos, skies with vultures, and coastlines with turtles whose migrations predate our earliest civilizations. The natural world was not a backdrop to human life; it was the condition that made human life possible. For millennia, animals […]
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Sharks and Rays and Skates and Chimaeras: Spielberg/Benchley Messed it up big time back then for Great WHITES — Now?

As a shark conservation scientist, one of the most common questions people ask me is, “How are shark populations doing?” To answer this question, it’s important to understand two types of fishery surveys: fishery-independent and fishery-dependent. Fishery-dependent population surveys gather data from fishermen’s catches. These data are valuable because there are many more fishermen on […]
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Add Homo sapiens to the Endangered Species List

Preventing extinction of species is a major concern of many countries in the world today. Legislation to accomplish this is usually based on an endangered species list. Such a list should include any animal or plant species that has been deemed likely to go extinct in a few generations. Listing would normally trigger protective actions to […]
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Armageddon and the Limits of Evolution
On March 28, 2022, the Biden administration sent to Congress a revised version of its classified National Defense Strategy. The new version removed the longstanding doctrine of “no first use” of nuclear weapons, and opened the door to a nuclear response to a non-nuclear threat. Within months of the new U.S. policy, but without referring […]
