Originally posted on strange behaviors:
Tourism has long been the leading economic sector in Jamaica, bringing in half of all foreign revenue and supporting a quarter of all jobs. Yet government officials now risk jeopardizing that lucrative business, and Jamaica’s reputation in the international community, with a secretive deal to let a Chinese company build…

Originally posted on strange behaviors:
Feeling much better today, thank you. (Photo: Mike Blake/Reuters) In the thick of the struggle to achieve any progress on environmental issues, it’s easy to despair. The political world can seem to be dominated by preening nimrods who value wildlife only as targets. Plutocrats with bottomless bank accounts call the…

Originally posted on strange behaviors:
Adorable but deadly (Photo: Richard Conniff) My latest for Takepart: Earlier this week, I published an article in the New York Times remembering a cat I once owned and loved named Lucky. She was my last outdoor cat, partly because her own death was a bloody reminder of just how…

Originally posted on The Last Word on Wildlife:
The scimitar-horned oryx was declared extinct in the wild in 2002photo: Exotic Wildlife Association Recently, in a legal ploy designed to undermine the “Three Amigos” provision of the Appropriations Act of 2014, the Friends of Animals (FoA) filed a federal lawsuit to try and stop the conservation…

Originally posted on strange behaviors:
After a major cleanup effort, beavers have returned to the Bronx River. (Photo: Robert McGouey/Getty Images) My latest column for Takepart, the website of the movie company Participant Media: When conservationists worry about the prospect of a world without wildlife, they often focus on two related developments: the sprawling growth…