CONSERVATION STARTER: Edgar Wayburn, a five-time Sierra Club president who's credited with protecting more wilderness and parkland than any other U.S. citizen, died March 5 at the age of 103. Wayburn was a physician by trade and a volunteer conservationist, often working evenings and weekends to defend undeveloped lands in California and Alaska. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1999, the nation's highest civilian honor, for both his unwavering love of nature and his uncanny ability to make others see what he saw. Educated at the University of Georgia and Harvard Medical School, Wayburn moved to San Francisco in 1933 and, after serving in World War II, returned to see sprawling suburbs beginning to take over the Bay Area. He spent the next half century working to save natural landscapes up and down the West Coast, often winning over hardened cynics along the way such as Nixon-era Interior Secretary Rogers Morton. And throughout it all, he continued practicing medicine while pioneering modern U.S. conservationism in his free time. "I have loved medicine and conservation," he once told the journal of the San Francisco Medical Society. "In one sense, my involvement with both might be summed up in a single word: survival. Medicine is concerned with the short-term survival of the human species, conservation with the long-term survival of the human and other species as well. We are all related." (Sources: Washington Post, Sierra Club)

 

SHOT IN THE DARK: A mysterious substance that makes up a quarter of the universe, yet whose existence has never been proven, could soon have its coming-out party, according to scientists working on the world's most powerful particle accelerator. While the Large Hadron Collider is now gearing up to recreate conditions that would have immediately followed the Big Bang, it could also produce some evidence for "dark matter" in the short term, said Rolf-Dieter Heuer, director-general of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, to a news conference Monday. "We don't know what dark matter is," he said. "Our Large Hadron Collider could be the first machine to give us insight into the dark universe. We are opening the door to new physics, to a discovery period." Only about 5 percent of the universe is currently known, with the rest consisting of dark matter (25 percent) and dark energy (70 percent). "If we can detect and understand dark matter, our knowledge will expand to encompass 30 percent of the universe, a huge step forward," Heuer said. (Source: Reuters)

 

SEA LION DEATH PANELS: Sea lions won't stop eating endangered chinook salmon in Oregon and Washington, and after wildlife officials have dropped bombs and fired rubber bullets to dissuade them, they've now resorted to simply executing the marine mammals one by one, the AP reports. Eleven sea lions were killed in 2009, and last week a California sea lion became the first one offed this year. The problem is that many upper Columbia River spring salmon runs are listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, yet the fish must gather in unnatural densities while they wait to climb up manmade fish ladders to cross the Bonneville Dam. Sea lions have become well aware of this, and now officials are tracking 63 repeat offenders, holding out the possibility of killing them if they can't convince them to stop eating the salmon. Critics of the program say the real problems are the dams that slow down the salmon runs, and also point out that humans are still fishing for salmon, even as we're killing sea lions for doing the same thing. As Gawker explains, it's a classic case of "cute vs. yummy," forcing us to decide whether we'd rather eat delicious, wild-caught chinook salmon or avoid having dead sea lions on our consciences. (Sources: Associated Press, Gawker)

 

THE SUN ALSO SETS: The Spanish city of Puertollano was once known for its coal mines, but two years ago it underwent an eco-overhaul, replacing its stalled fossil-fuel industry with fields of solar panels. Half of all solar power installed around the world in 2008 was in Spain, creating a sun-powered boomtown in Puertollano, where boutiques opened, people flocked and farmers sold land for solar plants. But many of those plants were poorly designed and shoddily built, the New York Times reports today, and as the Spanish government began to realize the necessity of subsidizing many of the cost-inefficient operations, the country's solar industry quickly contracted and crumbled. Still, as solar technology improves and the global industry grows, the surviving companies from Spain's solar boom could eventually lead the world market, an energy analyst tells the Times. "Even though incentives can create bubbles and bursts, without them this industry won't take off," she says. "The U.S. is really behind Europe on this, and if we wait until solar is cost-competitive on its own, we may miss the boat and an opportunity to shape the market." (Source: New York Times)

 

SEAL OF APPROVAL: Members of Canada's Parliament will eat meals of seal this week, showing their support for local hunters who are fighting a European Union ban of all products made from the animals. The parliamentary restaurant will serve harp seal meat as a political gesture to defend the country's annual hunt, which kills about 275,000 harp seals from mid-November to mid-May every year. The EU ban was imposed last July, aimed at reducing the market for what European officials deem unnecessary cruelty, while exempting products from traditional hunts by Inuit in Canada's Arctic, as well as those in Alaska, Greenland and Siberia. Canadian politicians generally support the hunts, which they argue are sustainable, humane and provide isolated communities with income. "All political parties will have the opportunity to demonstrate to the international community the solidarity of the Canadian parliament behind those who earn a living from the seal hunt," Liberal MP Celine Hervieux-Payette says of this week's seal meal. (Source: Guardian)

 

— Russell McLendon