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17 March 21
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Jesse Jackson | The Right to Vote Is the Foundation of Democracy
Jesse Jackson, The Chicago Sun-Times
Jackson writes: "America has become increasingly polarized politically. But democracy - and the right to vote - must be above partisanship."
he right to vote is the essential foundation of democracy. Yet today, across America, there is a systematic campaign by one party to curtail the right to vote, targeted particularly at minorities and the young.
As the Brennan Center for Justice reports, Republicans have introduced more than 250 legislative bills in 43 states that would make voting more difficult.
The campaign is propelled by the big lie spread by Donald Trump that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him. Republicans claim to be intent on restoring people’s confidence in the election system. In fact, Trump’s lies were refuted by state Republican election officials, by federal courts, many presided over by Trump-appointed judges, and by Trump’s own attorney general.
Republican senators and legislators and elected state officials do not question the legitimacy of their victories. Yet they are now using Trump’s big lie as the rationale for suppressing the right to vote.
Many of the legislative changes are surgically targeted to impact Black and minority voters. In Georgia, for example, Republicans are pushing legislation to limit early in-person voting days, to end no-excuse mail voting (except for voters over 65, who tend to vote Republican), and to limit the hours that mail ballot drop boxes will be open. They even seek to end Sunday in-person voting in the weeks leading up to the election, to curtail the “souls to the polls” efforts by Black churches to encourage civic participation.
Georgia election officials notoriously cut the number of polling stations, particularly in Fulton County, where Black voters are concentrated. That forced voters to wait for hours in long lines to cast a vote. That, of course, made it more difficult for workers and those who were ailing to vote. Now to make it even harder, Republican legislators seek to prohibit volunteers from giving water and food to those waiting in line. Lines themselves are a national disgrace. The ban on water and food is an offense against basic decency.
Sadly, in America, the right to vote has always been contested. The Founders limited the right to vote to male property owners; neither women nor, needless to say, slaves could vote. It took massive struggles — and eventually a Civil War — to end slavery and gain the right to vote for African Americans. But almost immediately, across the South, the Confederate establishment erected Jim Crow laws to enforce segregation and devised a range of tactics — from poll taxes, to rigged exams to plain violent intimidation — to keep African Americans from voting.
One of the first objectives of the civil rights movement was passage of the Voting Rights Act, mandating federal protection of the right to vote, and prior federal review of changes that would discriminate against African Americans.
Today’s Republicans — the modern-day Confederates — are brazen in their efforts to ensure that only the “right” people vote. The gang of five right-wing justices on the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, opening the floodgates to discriminatory state restrictions. The election in 2022 will be the first post-census election since the gutting of the Voting Rights Act. And Republicans are once more intent on making it harder for minorities to vote.
The U.S. House of Representatives passed essential legislation — H.R. 1, the For the People Act — to provide federal standards to elections to federal office. H.R. 1 (labeled S1 in the Senate) would provide for automatic voter registration and same-day voter registration. It would mandate a minimum of 15 days for early voting, with polls open at least 10 hours per day so that workers might have a chance to vote. It would limit purges of voting rolls.
The new law would require nonpartisan citizen commissions to do redistricting after a new census. It would require super PACs and “dark money” operations to disclose their donors. It would provide matching grants for small donations, reducing the force of big money in our elections.
These are simply common-sense standards for a clean election system. Yet Republicans furiously denounce them, and Senate Republicans promise to filibuster against the act, blocking its passage unless Democrats can unify around suspending the filibuster in order to allow the majority to pass it.
Over the last years, America has become increasingly polarized politically. But democracy — and the right to vote — must be above partisanship. There ought to be universal support for creating an election system that makes voting easy, limits big money and requires nonpartisan redistricting. It is shameful that the efforts to suppress the vote of African Americans and others that were perfected under segregation are being revived in a new guise in the 21st century.
Americans must mobilize to demand that the Senate pass H.R. 1 to protect the right to vote. And whether it passes or not, African Americans, Latinos, the young should see the efforts to suppress their vote as the insult that it is. And we should mobilize to vote in large numbers — overcoming whatever barriers are put in our way — to reaffirm our democratic rights, and to hold accountable those who would try to trample them.
People with the medical examiner's office wheel out a body on a stretcher from a massage parlor where three people were shot and killed on March 16, 2021, in Atlanta, Georgia. (photo: Elijah Nouvelage/AFP/Getty Images)
ALSO SEE: Asian Americans Reported 3,800 Hate-Related
Incidents Last Year
Georgia Spa Shootings: Suspect Arrested After 8 People Killed; Most Victims Were Asian
Elinor Aspegren and Ryan W. Miller, USA Today
ight people, most of them women of Asian descent, were killed Tuesday night in three shootings at Atlanta-area spas before police arrested a 21-year-old man suspected of being the lone gunman.
Police have not released the names of the victims nor indicated any possible motive of the suspect but at least four were of Korean descent, South Korea’s Foreign Ministry said in statement Wednesday. Authorities also told the Atlanta Journal Constitution that six of the eight victims appeared to be Asian women.
The killings came amid a recent wave of attacks against Asian Americans that coincided with the spread of the coronavirus across the United States.
The first shooting began around 5 p.m. Tuesday some 30 miles north of Atlanta when five people were shot at a massage parlor, Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office spokesman Capt. Jay Baker said. Two of the victims died at the scene. Three were taken to a hospital, where two of them also died, Baker said.
About an hour later, Atlanta police responded to calls for a robbery in progress and found three women dead at the Gold Spa, Atlanta Police Sgt. John Chafee said. While still on scene, police received calls for shots fired across the street at another spa, where they found another woman fatally shot.
Video evidence "suggests it is extremely likely" the suspect is the same in each attack, Chafee said in a statement to USA TODAY.
"Many have asked whether these shootings are related to Cherokee County's shootings," Chafee said. "Video footage from our Video Integration Center places the Cherokee County suspect's vehicle in the area, around the time of our Piedmont Road (in Atlanta) shootings. That, along with video evidence viewed by investigators, suggests it is extremely likely our suspect is the same as Cherokee County's, who is in custody."
Here's what we know:
Where did the shootings happen?
Two of the shootings occurred across the street from each other in Atlanta on Piedmont Road, at the Gold Spa and the Aromatherapy Spa, following a shooting in the suburbs.
The first incident happened at Young's Asian Massage Parlor in a strip mall off Highway 92 near a rural area in Acworth, about 30 miles north of Atlanta.
Who is the suspect, Robert Long?
Robert Aaron Long, 21, of Woodstock, Georgia, was taken into custody in Crisp County on Tuesday night, about 150 miles south of Atlanta, Baker said.
Deputies in Crisp County received information that Long was traveling south in a black SUV around 8 p.m., a sheriff's spokesperson told USA TODAY.
He was spotted by Georgia State Patrol troopers and Crisp County deputies. He was arrested and taken to the County Detention Center.
Wednesday morning, Long was extradited into Cherokee County sheriff's custody, Haley Little, a Crisp County Sheriff's Office spokesperson told USA TODAY.
Who were the victims?
The victims in the Acworth shooting were two Asian women, a white woman and a white man, Baker told the Atlanta Journal Constitution. The fifth victim was a Hispanic man who was injured and taken to the hospital.
All four victims of the Atlanta shootings appeared to be Asian women, police told the Atlanta Journal Constitution. Police have not released the identities of the victims.
The South Korean Foreign Ministry said Wednesday that its diplomats in Atlanta confirmed four of the women were of Korean descent.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is currently in South Korea meeting with Foreign Minister Chung Eui-yong and addressed the killings Wednesday. “We are horrified by this violence which has no place in America or anywhere,” he said.
In a statement, Stop AAPI Hate, which tracks incidents of discrimination and xenophobia against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, said: "The reported shootings of multiple Asian American women today in Atlanta is an unspeakable tragedy — for the families of the victims first and foremost, but also for the Asian American community, which has been reeling from high levels of racist attacks over the course of the past year,"
"This latest attack will only exacerbate the fear and pain that the Asian American community continues to endure."
What is the motive?
Police are investigating and haven't speculated as to the suspect's motive.
Brett Kavanaugh is sworn in during his Senate judiciary committee hearing on 27 September 2018. (photo: Getty Images)
FBI Facing Allegation That Its 2018 Background Check of Brett Kavanaugh Was 'Fake'
Stephanie Kirchgaessner, Guardian UK
Kirchgaessner writes:
A Democratic senator has asked attorney general Merrick Garland to facilitate ‘proper oversight’ into concerns on the investigation
he FBI is facing new scrutiny for its 2018 background check of Brett Kavanaugh, the supreme court justice, after a lawmaker suggested that the investigation may have been “fake”.
Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democratic senator and former prosecutor who serves on the judiciary committee, is calling on the newly-confirmed attorney general, Merrick Garland, to help facilitate “proper oversight” by the Senate into questions about how thoroughly the FBI investigated Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearing.
The supreme court justice was accused of sexual assault by Christine Blasey Ford and faced several other allegations of misconduct following Ford’s harrowing testimony of an alleged assault when she and Kavanaugh were in high school.
Kavanaugh denied the claims.
The FBI was called to investigate the allegations during the Senate confirmation process but was later accused by some Democratic senators of conducting an incomplete background check. For example, two key witnesses – Ford and Kavanaugh – were never interviewed as part of the inquiry.
Among the concerns listed in Whitehouse’s letter to Garland are allegations that some witnesses who wanted to share their accounts with the FBI could not find anyone at the bureau who would accept their testimony and that it had not assigned any individual to accept or gather evidence.
“This was unique behavior in my experience, as the Bureau is usually amenable to information and evidence; but in this matter the shutters were closed, the drawbridge drawn up, and there was no point of entry by which members of the public or Congress could provide information to the FBI,” Whitehouse said.
He added that, once the FBI decided to create a “tip line”, senators were not given any information on how or whether new allegations were processed and evaluated. While senators’ brief review of the allegations gathered by the tip line showed a “stack” of information had come in, there was no further explanation on the steps that had been taken to review the information, Whitehouse said.
“This ‘tip line’ appears to have operated more like a garbage chute, with everything that came down the chute consigned without review to the figurative dumpster,” he said.
He also criticized FBI director Chris Wray, who Joe Biden has elected to remain in place, for not answering questions about the investigation.
The FBI did not respond to a request for comment. The DOJ did not respond to a request for comment.
While it is unclear whether the FBI would re-open an investigation into Kavanaugh, who is now one of nine justices on the supreme court, the letter could push Garland to force the DOJ to respond to questions about the investigation into Kavanaugh.
Whitehouse said he is seeking answers about “how, why, and at whose behest” the FBI conducted a “fake” investigation if standard procedures were violated, including standards for following allegations gathered through FBI “tip lines”.
CBP lifts a little girl into a van. (photo: John Moore/Getty Images)
Three-Level Bunks and Mats on Floors as Migrant Kids Wait in Border Patrol Facilities Amid Surge
Priscilla Alvarez and Geneva Sands, CNN
Excerpt: "Children are alternating schedules to make space for one another in confined facilities, some kids haven't seen sunlight in days, and others are taking turns showering, often going days without one."
READ MORE
A note on a student's cap reads, 'I am in so much debt please help' during graduation at Northeastern University on May 3, 2019. (photo: Suzanne Kreiter/Boston Globe/Getty Images)
Senate Democrats Plead With Biden to Erase Student Debt With Executive Order
Dartunorro Clark, NBC News
Clark writes: "Senate Democrats on Monday urged President Joe Biden to use his executive powers to cancel up to ,000 in student debt following the passage of the .9 trillion Covid-19 relief package, which included a provision to make student loan forgiveness tax-free until 2025."
READ MORE
An indigenous woman casts her vote during regional elections on March 7, 2021 in Laja, Bolivia, thirty kilometers outside La Paz. (photo: Aizar Raldes/AFP/Getty Images)
Last Week's Bolivian Elections Showed the Right Is Up to Its Old Antidemocratic Tricks
Cindy Forster, Jacobin
Forster writes: "Bolivians went to the polls last week for the first local elections since the 2019 coup. Evo Morales's Movement Toward Socialism party won big - and it would have even performed even better without the undemocratic scheming of the Right."
arch 7 marked the first local elections in Bolivia since the coup of 2019 that ousted former president Evo Morales. After a fresh surge of popular mobilization finally compelled Jeanine Áñez’s “interim” regime to hold national elections last October, the Bolivian people voted in a landslide to return to government the same political party — the progressive Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) — that had been driven from power by the coup the previous year.
Since the election of Luis Arce Catacora, MAS has weathered repeated coup plots, but President Arce has held firm. Indeed, the arrest of Áñez and a number of her former ministers and ex-commanders over the weekend — a story causing much scandal in the international press — indicates that justice might finally be seen for those families of the dozens massacred, and many hundreds injured, during the violent ousting of Morales from the presidency.
In local elections, MAS has again had a strong showing, and seems to have swept the country in the vote for governors, regional assemblies, mayors, and city council people. The significant exception is the cities with wealthy enclaves, which identify as mestizo. Final results should be known once rural votes from far-flung hamlets are counted. (The electoral observer mission of Parlasur opposes the quick count of votes because it “generates confusion.”)
As Bolivian journalist Ollie Vargas has noted, “there is not a single organization that is challenging MAS at the national level. MAS is Bolivia’s only political party with a physical presence in every municipality, in every region, and every culture within the country.” In the cities, the lay of the land is quite different, and it is here that the right-wing head of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE) in Bolivia, Salvador Romero, has had a major influence.
It is thanks to decisions made by him — allowing ultra-right, corrupt candidates to run for office, despite the clear legal impediment to their candidacies — that the TSE has helped secure the right-wing capture of cities like La Paz, Cochabamba, Santa Cruz, and Potosí. El Alto and probably the regional capital of Pando have been won by woman candidates who had once been members of MAS.
Washington’s Man
Salvador Romero has a long and dubious history on the Right. According to the Honduran historian and PhD student of history at Yale, and immigrants’ rights organizer Cristian Padilla, Romero was a key player in the coup d’état in Honduras in 2009, maintaining deep connections to the Honduran elite, as well as with the US foreign policy establishment.
The Honduran coup took place on the day of a democratic referendum on constitutional reform. The military seized progressive president Manuel (Mel) Zelaya, taking him first to a US airbase and then into exile, thus launching Honduras into its most tragic decade since the republic was founded, and from which it has yet to emerge.
Salvador Romero worked in Honduras from 2011 to 2014 to legitimize the coup regime and the ensuing elections, paid on the books by a US-created agency, the so-called National Democratic Institute (NDI). Although Romero is head of the elections process unfolding amidst high tension in Bolivia, he left Bolivia and went to Honduras this week, where he is an electoral observer of their primary elections.
Prior to his directorship of the NDI in Honduras, Salvador Romero had nurtured his relationship “with the US Agency for International Development or US AID in Bolivia.” According to documents made available to WikiLeaks, Romero worked closely with US ambassador Philip Goldberg, who was expelled by former president Evo Morales in 2008 following the revelation of the ambassador’s intimate association with right-wing elites that were planning to secede from Bolivia.
Three Decisions
Romero’s role as the head of the electoral tribunal has been instrumental for the outcome in the major cities, and three of Romero’s decisions in particular have changed the course of the elections. First was Romero’s decision to allow the right-wing candidate for mayor of La Paz, Luis Larrea, to remain in the race, even after he had broken election rules that forbid media appearances in the days leading up to an election.
A doctor and media personality, Larrea has been a key player in a medical strike called by private physicians, in opposition to the government’s new legislation to regulate fees for private practitioners as well as medicines. For figures like Larrea, the idea of health care as a public good — a policy championed by MAS — is heavily contested as a limit on their income. Private doctors lived high off the hog during the eleven months of the coup regime and presided over one of the worst-managed COVID-19 crises on Earth.
Adding salt to the wound, the leaders of the private physicians’ association had agreed to the MAS government’s new law regulating prices for health care, but then broke their word and went out on strike. It was the exact moment when mass vaccinations were just beginning and elections were around the corner.
According to an investigation by the national human rights defenders’ office, some 80 percent of hospitals and clinics refused to join the strike. The public was not impressed by the striking doctors’ arguments either. But for reasons that the Supreme Electoral Tribunal is not required to divulge, the original sanction against Larrea’s candidacy was subsequently reversed.
In another opaque decision, a former military officer who has just won the mayorship of Cochabamba, Manfred Reyes Villa, was also removed from the race only to be reinstated by Romero at the last minute. That Reyes Villa was allowed to run is astonishing: he does not live in Cochabamba, he is himself in trouble with the justice system, and prior to his recent return to the country during the coup regime, he has not resided in Bolivia for ten years. One of these infringements alone should have been enough to disqualify Reyes Villa from the race.
As a young man, Reyes Villa served in the military during the height of the South American dictatorships, and trained at the US “School of the Americas” whose torture manuals are public knowledge and whose graduates committed many of the region’s crimes against humanity. Early in the era of Evo Morales, he emerged as a national leader of the secessionist movement that sought to divide the country, with guidance from the same US ambassador who tore apart Yugoslavia, Philip Goldberg.
More recently, Reyes Villa was mayor of Cochabamba in the 1990s, and fled from Bolivia under investigation for a slew of corruption charges. He formed paramilitary shock groups to attack peaceful marches of the Indigenous. He would not have returned from his US exile had Jeanine Áñez not welcomed him back as a hero of the Right. Both Reyes Villa and Luis Fernando Camacho, the winner of the governorship of the agro-industrial powerhouse of Santa Cruz, dream of seceding from Bolivia to create a politically fascist republic in the country’s lowlands.
The winner of the La Paz mayoral race, Iván Arias, should also have been excluded from running thanks to various corruption charges against him, most notably as the minister of public works, a role to which he was appointed by Áñez. He was a prominent member of the coup government from the very beginning.
Iván Arias tried everything short of physical assault to injure his main competitor for the mayorship of La Paz, MAS candidate and early frontrunner César Dockweiler. (Dockweiler’s company constructed the network of cable cars that linked La Paz and El Alto during Morales’s era.) Arias ran a persecutory campaign against Dockweiler, falsely accusing him of corruption, sedition, and terrorism. It was such smears that destroyed Dockweiler’s early lead in the polls.
Through these actions, Salvador Romero has all but handed over these populous cities to mayors who view MAS as their sworn enemy, and who in their careers so far, have created and celebrated paramilitary machines. Only time will tell what they will do next.
Iberian lynx in Spain. (photo: www.lynxexsitu.es/Wikimedia Commons)
Conservation Actions Help Iberian Lynx Claw Back From Brink of Extinction
Johan Augustin, Mongabay
Augustin writes: "A battery of conservation measures targeting the wide range of threats to the species has seen it bounce back from the brink, with a wild population today of around 1,000."
t’s midday in summer, the mercury climbing above 40° Celsius (104° Fahrenheit), and nature guide Nuno Roxo is leading us on a hike in Guadiana Valley National Park in Portugal. The high grass and herbs, battered by the strong sun, have not seen any rain for several months. We continue down a narrow trail, used by wildlife such as boars and deer. Rabbits bolt off into the bushes.
The scenario looks promising for the return of the region’s top predator, for which rabbits are the favorite prey: the Iberian lynx. Nuno says that in his many years of guiding, he’s only caught a glimpse of the elusive cats once, quickly whizzing by. The best chance to see them, he says, is by the sheep pens, where the lynx lie in ambush — but not for the sheep.
“The lynx catch the foxes that come to kill the sheep, so the landowners appreciate having lynx on their property,” Nuno says.
It wasn’t always so. Half a century ago, the Iberian Peninsula, comprising Spain and Portugal, was home to thousands of Iberian lynx (Lynx pardinus). The species is about half the size of the more common Eurasian lynx (Lynx lynx) found in cooler climates further north, but shared the same bad reputation for preying on livestock. That made it a favorite target of farmers, who saw it as vermin, as well as hunters who sought out its pelt and meat, or mounted it as a trophy.
It took until the early 1970s before the Iberian lynx was legally protected. But the decline continued, driven by habitat fragmentation, road kill, and loss of prey species, particularly the European rabbit (Oryctolagus cuniculus), which accounts for about 75% of the Iberian lynx’s diet. By the start of the new millennium, lynx populations had hit a dramatic low: in 2002, only 94 Iberian lynx still roamed Spain, and in Portugal the species was declared locally extinct. The species was considered the world’s most endangered cat, next to the Amur leopard (Panthera pardus orientalis), and was on track to becoming the first cat species to die out since the saber-toothed tiger 12,000 years ago.
Since that low, however, the cat has bounced back. In Spain, the government, scientists and environmental organizations have worked on reintroducing the lynx from animals raised at captive-breeding facilities. They have also worked with their peers across the border in Portugal, and in 2016, the first captive-bred lynx were released in Portugal’s southeastern Alentejo region, near the Spanish border. To date, 47 lynx have been released in Portugal.
There are now an estimated 1,000 Iberian lynx on the peninsula, with about 154 in Portugal’s Guadiana Valley. The remarkable comeback has seen the species’ conservation status improve on the IUCN Red List from critically endangered to endangered.
Battery of conservation solutions
There’s no one silver bullet that can be credited with saving the Iberian lynx from extinction. Instead, the solution has been a combination of tried and tested conservation methods and innovative approaches, carried out across jurisdictions and helped by growing public awareness of the importance of conserving biodiversity.
Among the top threats to the species was the loss and fragmentation of habitat. Between 1960 and 1990, an estimated 80% of lynx range succumbed to degradation and habitat loss. Roads were a key part of this problem, obstructing the genetic exchange between different individuals and resulting in deaths from vehicle collisions. In Spain, building wildlife tunnels beneath busy highways has helped address the problem, and Portugal plans on emulating this solution. Creating wildlife corridors between the two countries is also tackling the genetic bottleneck, giving the animals back a natural range that transcends the concept of national borders.
“We are trying to increase their territory,” says João Alves, principal adviser to the government-run Institute for Nature Conservation and Forests, or ICNF by its Portuguese acronym.
He tells Mongabay he’s pleased by the results and hopes that extended corridors will see the lynx population grow further, although there’s still some way to go to securing enough range. Each lynx needs a territory of about 10 square kilometers (4 square miles), but the total area of current lynx territory in Portugal covers 500 km2 (193 mi2), which means more land must be secured.
“The lynx need habitat to live in,” says Olga Martins, regional director at the ICNF office in the city of Mértola in Alentejo.
A large proportion of potential lynx territory is privately owned, where landowners see more profit in cultivating olive groves and vineyards, turning the landscape into monocultures — barren land from a conservation perspective. To prevent this loss of viable habitat, the ICNF encouraging landowners to return to more traditional agroforestry systems called montados: a mosaic landscape characterized by low-density tree cover combined with agricultural or pastoral activities.
Another solution is rewilding. In Portugal, and elsewhere in Europe, environmental organizations such as Rewilding Europe are buying up land from farmers and other landowners with the express purpose of restoring the biodiversity. A key part of making such a solution work, especially for predatory species such as lynx and wolves, is to get the locals on board. This seems to be working in Alentejo, conservationists say. Landowners and hunters, previously hostile to the presence of lynx on their land, have changed their minds. Livestock farmers, in particular, have found that the lynx don’t attack domestic animals, despite their age-old reputation on this point.
Restoring the rabbits
The disappearance of the European rabbit from much of its historical range, due to epidemics of myxomatosis and rabbit hemorrhagic disease, was another of the factors that drove the decline of the Iberian lynx. Myxomatosis, a viral disease from South America, was intentionally introduced into France in the 1950s to control populations of wild rabbit, which were considered vermin by farmers. The virus then spread southwest through the Iberian Peninsula, decimating the rabbit populations there, and with them, the lynx.
As part of the lynx reintroduction program, conservationists are also trying to boost the rabbit population. In Alentejo, these efforts are sold as a win-win all around: for the residents, rabbit has long been a cherished game animal and part of the traditional cuisine. Many landowners have now built artificial tunnels for the rabbits in the extremely compact soil, and provide guided tours to visitors keen to spot lynx — even if the odds of sighting this elusive cat are slim.
There are currently four captive-breeding centers for the Iberian lynx: three in Spain and one in Portugal. The selection of animals for breeding and for release is determined by the Iberian Lynx Captive Breeding Committee, or CCCLI by its Spanish acronym. It brings together technical and scientific representatives from Spain and Portugal, who decide which animals will be released and where, to maximize the genetic diversity of the wild populations.
“If we have a total of 750 females on the Iberian Peninsula, it will be a viable number,” Alves says.
The outlook appears promising: Fifty kittens were born in the spring of 2020 in Guadiana Valley National Park, more than the number of captive-bred lynx released in Portugal in the past five years.
Addressing range of threats
Addressing the range of threats to the Iberian lynx and devising solutions for each one has been key to pulling the species back from the brink, says Rike Bolam, a conservation scientist at Newcastle University in the U.K.
Bolam is the lead author of a study published last year that showed how conservation actions prevented the extinctions of seven to 16 mammal and 21 to 32 bird species since 1993. Among these is the Iberian lynx. (1993 was chosen as the baseline because that was the year the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity came into force, ushering in a wave of zoo-based conservation programs, formal legal protections, and reintroduction efforts.)
“The Iberian lynx suffers from a wide range of threats, and I think it has been really important that not just one or two of them were addressed, but a whole range of them,” Bolam tells Mongabay. “The lack of prey has been addressed by habitat management, lack of den sites is addressed by providing artificial sites.”
Bolam adds that road accidents are decreasing as a result of traffic-slowing measures, and illegal hunting is also fading thanks to awareness-raising with the public and monitoring for illegal traps.
“In addition to addressing the direct threats, there have been translocations and reintroductions into other areas to boost the population,” she says.
That last measure will prove important for sustaining the Iberian lynx in the wild against another growing threat: climate change.
Climate projections show regions in the south of the Iberian Peninsula where the lynx currently occurs may no longer be suitable for the species. The current reintroduction program, which is expanding the lynx’s range to the north, could improve its resilience to climate change.
“[I]t may help the species to spread to northern parts,” Bolam says, “mainly by reintroducing the species to other areas, as there is a lack of habitat corridor.”
She says the battery of conservation solutions that saved the Iberian lynx can be applied to other species on the brink. Many species face common problems, she notes: habitat loss through agriculture, and direct threats through logging, hunting and fishing.
“There are now models that show we can limit these drivers whilst still feeding everyone,” Bolam says. “But it will require changes in consumption practices, such as stopping food waste and eating less meat, as well as limiting climate change.”
This article was originally published on Mongabay.
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