YEAR IN REVIEW 2000: ENVIRONMENT

Gardening The wet weather that plagued much of northwestern Europe during the fall and winter of 1998 continued through the spring of 1999 and was followed by a prolonged drought that lasted the entire summer. Despite late planting, many crops matured early, and seed crops, though not as abundant as in some seasons, were of especially high quality, with above-average germination. Many seed-producing companies continued to expand their operations in China, where favourable climates, inexpensive, well- trained labour, and government support made operations quite profitable for foreign producers. Although the spring was unusually hot in northern Chinawhere most crops were producedand led to some damage to cool-weather crops like snapdragon, lettuce, and chicory, the season was successful and crops were good. Seed companies in the U.S. noted significant increases in sales of vegetable seed owing to home gardeners' fears about the impact of the Y2K computer problem on energy- and food-distribution systems. This led to sales increases of more than 20% in some cases and spot shortages of some vegetable seed. Consolidation also continued in the seed industry. Whereas in previous years ownership changes in the producer and agronomic sectors had been prevalent, 1999 saw retail mail-order nurseries Gurney's and Henry Field's purchased by Foster and Gallagher, which, with holdings that included home garden merchants Breck's of Holland, Spring Hill Nurseries, Michigan Bulb Co., Stark Brothers' Nurseries, and the Vermont Wildflower Farm, claimed to be the largest direct-to-consumer North American distributor of garden products. In a separate transaction, J.W. Jung Seed Co. of Randolph, Wis., purchased R.H. Shumway Seedsman and a host of specialist subsidiaries, including Vermont Bean Seed Co., Seymour's Seeds, Totally Tomatoes, Carolina Seeds, and Horticultural Products and Services. The European flower-testing organization Fleuroselect did not award a gold medal for outdoor plants for the 2000 season, but it did reward one commercial greenhouse flower with that medal: Delphinium consolida (Annual Larkspur) Sydney Purple, bred by Hamer Bloemzaden of The Netherlands. Fully double, it bloomed in only 812 weeks from sowing, at a height of 120 cm (1 cm=0.4 in). All-America Selections (AAS) made four 2000 awards for vegetables. Hybrid Cabbage Savoy Express was chosen for its earliness, only 55 days from transplant. The half-kilogram (one-pound) heads were suitable for both spring and fall plantings, and at 20 cm high and 15 cm across, they could be spaced only 30 cm apart. Hybrid Pepper Blushing Beauty produced blocky, four-lobed, 10-cm fruits that ripened from ivory to coral and to red and were first ready for harvest about 72 days after transplanting. Plants stood 45 cm, were 40 cm wide, and were resistant to three races of bacterial leaf spot. Resistance to Fusarium wilt and powdery mildew were strong attributes of AAS 2000 winner Mr. Big garden pea. The 1.51.8-m (1 m=3.3 ft) plants bore mostly double 1112-cm pods containing 910 peas beginning two months after emergence. The final vegetable award from AAS went to Indian Summer hybrid sweet corn. Its 20-cm ears with 1618 rows of multicoloured kernels matured on 2.1-m plants in about 79 days from sowing. As an sh2 supersweet corn, it had to be isolated from other forms of sweet corn by about 75 m to avoid cross-pollination. The sh2 indicated that the corn had the shrunken two gene, which inhibited the normal sweet corn conversion of sugar to starch after harvest, therefore allowing the cobs to remain sweet for 714 days after harvest. Five new flower varieties also won AAS awards for 2000. Catharanthus roseus Stardust Orchid was the sole bedding-plant winner. Single orchid blossoms four centimetres in diameter with white centres were held just above glossy green shield-shaped foliage. Mature plants grown in a sunny spot reached 3540 cm in height and width. Cosmos sulphureus Cosmic Orange bore a full covering of golden orange semidouble blooms (5 cm in diameter) on mounding 30-cm plants with moderately divided mid-green foliage. Hybrid Dianthus Melody Pink was a new single-flowered annual with serrated petals and stems 5560 cm long. The first dwarf Mexican sunflower (Tithonia rotundifolia) to receive an AAS award was Fiesta del Sol, which grew only 6090 cm in height and width and had orange daisylike flowers (57.6 cm in diameter) with raised yellow centres. Soraya became the first true sunflower to win an AAS award because of its colourorange petals with a chocolate disc. The 1.51.8-m branching plants bore multiple 1015-cm blooms on long side stems, and those not harvested for bouquets provided seed for garden birds, a trait increasingly rare in new sunflower varieties. The Perennial Plant Association of the U.S. chose Scabiosa columbaria Butterfly Blue as its Plant of the Year. Reliably hardy from U.S. Department of Agriculture zones 39, it grew in full sun to light shade and bore 5-cm lavender flowers on 3038-cm stems from midspring to early fall if kept deadheaded. The nearly flat basal foliage was gray-green, ovate to lance shaped, and hairy, with its upper foliage more finely divided, forming a mounded rosette 1520 cm in height and at least 30 cm or more across. All-America Rose Selections named three winners for the 2000 season. Knock Out was a new hybrid shrub rose developed by William Radler that grew in height and width to 0.9 m. Its 7.69-cm cherry red blossoms had five to seven petals that gave off a light tea rose fragrance. Crimson Bouquet was a hardy disease-resistant grandiflora rose with 10.1-cm-diameter bright red flowers atop 4045-cm stems on a rounded plant 11 cm in height and 9 cm in width. A coral and cream bicolour, Gemini was a hybrid tea rose with 11-cm flowers, fully double, with a petal count of 2530 and long stems for cutting. This disease-resistant rose was hybridized by Keith Zary, using Anne Morrow Lindbergh and New Year as the parents. Shepherd Ogden The Environment International Activities United Nations Environment Programme. About 400 negotiators from 115 countries gathered in Geneva during Sept. 611, 1999, for the third of five meetings of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee for an International Legally Binding Instrument for Implementing International Action on Certain Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs). Of these POPs (12 chemicals nicknamed the dirty dozen), DDT was the most controversial. Although DDT was banned in 34 countries and its use was severely restricted in 34 more, the World Health Organization (WHO) approved it for malaria control, an action backed by most authorities on the disease. WHO Director General Gro Harlem Brundtland presented the meeting with an Action Plan for the Reduction of Reliance on DDT for Public Health Purposes. An open letter signed by 371 scientists, doctors, and health experts, including three Nobel laureates, pointed out that malaria deaths had increased wherever DDT use had declined. The World Wide Fund for Nature nevertheless insisted on a total ban. The talks ended with general agreement that production of 8 of the 12 POPs should cease when the treaty came into force in 2003 or 2004. All uses of aldrin, chlordane, DDT, dieldrin, endrin, heptachlor, mirex, toxaphene, hexachlorobenzene, and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) would be banned, with two exemptions. DDT would be permitted for use as an antimalarial insecticide, but all agricultural uses would be forbidden; and PCBs would still be allowed in electrical equipment, where they were already being used, but would be banned from all new applications. There was less clarity over dioxins and furans, which are by-products of processes. Negotiators planned to meet again in early 2000 in Bonn, Ger., to conclude the treaty at a meeting in South Africa later in 2000, and to sign it in Sweden in 2001. UN Economic Commission for Europe. A multipollutant protocol to the UN Economic Commission for Europe Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution was agreed to on September 2. About 32 European countries were expected to ratify it, and the U.S. and Canada were to sign a modified version. The protocol set national limits for emissions of sulfur, nitrogen oxides, volatile organic compounds (VOCs), and ammonia. These would come into force in 2010, and technical annexes would set guidelines for managing ammonia from farms and VOC emissions. At a diplomatic meeting of the European Union (EU) Council of Ministers held in Brussels later in September, there was disagreement over how ambitiously the EU should seek to implement the protocol. Southern European countries wished to hold to the figures agreed, but the Commission, supported by several northern states, wanted tougher action. Wildlife Conservation In 1999 the World Wildlife FundU.S. reported that global warming was disrupting ocean life and thus threatening the survival of large numbers of species, especially at higher latitudes. Some populations of North Pacific salmon had declined badly over the past two years as ocean temperatures in the region rose. Warmer waters had also brought about food shortages that led to the death of hundreds of thousands of seabirds. Climate warming was linked to the northward extensions of ranges of southern British breeding birds and of butterflies in Europe and to earlier breeding among the Mexican jay (Aphelocoma ultramarina) in North America. Six individuals of a supposedly extinct giant lizard (a species of Galliota) were captured on Gomera in the Canary Islands. The lizard, which was threatened by cats and rats, was thought to be among the world's most endangered reptiles, and a captive breeding project was under way. A new species of striped rabbit, related to the rare Nesolagus netcheri found in Sumatra in Indonesia, was reported from the Annamese Cordillera of Laos and Vietnam. Many island molluscan faunas were seriously threatened, but Discus guerinianus, one of the most elegant Madeiran land snails, was reported as rediscovered after having been believed extinct. In April the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) allowed Botswana, Namibia, and Zimbabwe to sell 57.8 tons of stockpiled ivory to Japan under tightly controlled conditions, the first permitted trade in ivory in 10 years. CITES parties had accepted that elephant populations in the three countries were stable or growing and controlled trade should be allowed. Funds from the sales were to be used for conservation. Scientists continued to be concerned about diseases that affect marine organisms, especially shellfish, corals, and marine mammals. Many of these diseases were caused by known microorganisms infecting new hosts, with climate change and human activities playing major roles by undermining host resistance and facilitating pathogen transmission. Research into the causes of massive die-offs of frogs resulted in some workers' linking population crashes in amphibians in highland forests in Costa Rica to climate change, whereas others believed that a new, virulent parasitic chytrid fungus was to blame for deaths and extinctions of frogs in Australia, Costa Rica, Panama, and the U.S. The discovery of the first hermaphrodite polar bear in Greenland raised fears that the populations of some 100,000 polar bears in the Arctic were threatened by environmental pollution. The phenomenon, which was reported in 1998 in seven bears on the Norwegian island of Spitzbergen, was believed to be the result of ingestion of polychlorinated biphenyls through the food chain. Pesticides were suspected to be the cause of the rapid decline in vultures throughout their range in northern India. As a result, animal carcasses were being left uneaten, creating a potential human health hazard. In the U.S. the removal of the bald eagle and peregine falcon from the endangered species list was hailed as a sign that the enforced reduction in pesticides such as DDT had been a success. In July eight Montserrat orioles (Icterus oberi) and nine mountain chickens (Leptodactylus fallax), a frog species valued for its meat, were captured on the island of Montserrat for a breeding program. Both had declined in numbers as a result of volcanic activity on Montserrat. The Australian government proposed a 6,000-km (3,700-mi) increase in the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park to protect the entire system. The new protected areas included seagrass beds that were of vital importance to dugongs. Oysters were returning to the Hudson River within 16 km (10 mi) of New York City as a result of a river cleanup started in the late 1960s. The numbers of California condors (Gymnogyps californianus) rose to 28 in the wild in California; in Arizona 28 had been released since 1996 and 97 were in captivity. Scientists from China's National Academy of Sciences announced in June that they had taken a step toward cloning the giant panda in a bid to save it from extinction. They had produced an embryo by transferring the nucleus of an adult giant panda cell into an egg from a rabbit and were attempting to implant the embryo in the uterus of a black bear foster mother. Twenty percent of the remaining 100 endangered Vancouver Island marmots (Marmota vancouverensis) were captured for a breeding program after clear-cut logging in the valleys had isolated colonies. Mass nesting by tens of thousands of endangered olive ridley turtles ( Lepidochelys olivacea) occurred on the beaches of Orissa state in India, for the first time in three years. Conservationists hailed the turtles' return as the fruit of a massive protection exercise by volunteer groups and government departments against drowning of turtles in illegally operated trawl fisheries. On April 26 the U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service set new rules to stop overfishing of large coastal sharks in the Atlantic Ocean. They called for major cuts in commercial and recreational quotas and a moratorium on 19 species. On May 3 the Norwegian whaling season opened with a fleet of 36 boats set to hunt a self-awarded quota of 753 minke whales (Balaenoptera acutorostrata), the highest number since the moratorium on commercial whaling went into force in 1986. One week earlier the Japanese fleet had returned with 389 minke whales, killed in the Southern Ocean. In March Iceland had announced plans to resume commercial whaling by the end of 2000. At the 51st meeting of the International Whaling Committee (IWC), held in May in St. George's, Grenada, delegates rejected virtually every proposal by whaling nations Japan and Norway to ease restrictions on commercial whaling, reasserted the IWC's role as the world authority on whale management, and opposed Japan's motion to reopen the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary to whaling. The growing trade in bushmeat (meat from wild animals) in many parts of tropical central and western Africa was reported to be unsustainable as a result of increased demand from urban markets and logging concession workers. At the first Abu Dhabi International Arabian Oryx Conference, held in the United Arab Emirates in February, it was reported that poachers had reduced the reintroduced wild population of Arabian oryx (Oryx leucoryx) in Oman from over 400 to 138. The population was no longer viable, and some of the remaining animals were rescued to form a captive herd. Antipoaching measures had been strengthened, however, and there had been no poaching since January. The Tibetan antelope (Pantholops hodgsonii), or chiru, was on the edge of extinction as a result of its being hunted for its valuable underwool, called shahtoosh, which was used in making fashionable shawls. Musk deer (species of Moschus) populations were declining fast in nearly all of the 13 countries where they occurred in Asia and eastern parts of Russia as a result of the high demand for musk (from the male scent glands) for medicines and perfumes. Musk was one of the world's most expensive natural products, with a retail value three to five times higher than that of gold. Widespread illegal trade was occurring without the required CITES permits. Jacqui M. Morris Zoos Zoos continued to expand their role in reintroducing threatened animals into their natural environments. Six Louisiana pine snakes (Pituophis ruthveni) bred at the Audubon Zoo in New Orleans were released in northern Louisiana in 1999. Morphometric analysis by Steve Richling of the Memphis (Tenn.) Zoological Garden and Aquarium indicated that the Louisiana pine snake was arguably the most endangered species of snake in North America. The reintroduction program was carried out with the cooperation of the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries. The released snakes were equipped with transponders for future tracking and recapture studies. The Bramble Park Zoo, Watertown, S.D., and the Minnesota Zoo, Apple Valley, participated in a trumpeter swan restoration project in cooperation with the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources. Since 1993 Bramble Park Zoo's pair of swans had produced 24 cygnets for this program. The cygnets were parent-raised without human contact and then taken to the Minnesota Zoo before they grew flight feathers. After being fitted with bright orange wing tags, the two-year-old swans were released on lakes in Minnesota. By 1998 the Karner blue butterfly (Lycaeides melissa samuelis) had disappeared from the last oak prairies of Ohio because of habitat alteration and drought. A signature species of the oak-savannah ecosystem and protected by the Endangered Species Act since 1992, its population had nevertheless declined nationwide by 99% during the past 100 years. With the help of the American Zoo and Aquarium Association (AZA), the Toledo (Ohio) Zoo, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Michigan and Ohio departments of natural resources, and the Nature Conservancy, live specimens from a healthy Karner blue butterfly population in Allegan, Mich., were taken to the Toledo Zoo for breeding. More than 100 adult butterflies were reintroduced to natural environments in Ohio during 1998 and twice that number in 1999. In late 1998 a southern black rhinoceros (Diceros bicornis) was moved from the White Oak Conservation Center in Yulee, Fla., to Kruger National Park in South Africa. Analysis of the genetic makeup of the Kruger rhino population indicated the need for additional genetic enhancement. Potential disease transfer issues prevented the safe translocation of wild rhinos from other regions of Africa. Born at the White Oak Conservation Center in 1996 from parents caught in the wild in Zimbabwe, the young male black rhino made the 56-hour trip to Kruger National Park under the watchful eye of the park's chief veterinarian. Kruger protected one of the healthiest black rhino populations on the African continent, and it was anticipated that the young male would eventually contribute healthy genetic offspring to this cooperative rhino conservation program. Project Betampona, a release program of black-and-white ruffed lemurs (Varecia variegata variegata) into Betampona Natural Reserve in Madagascar, continued in 1999. Nine captive-bred lemurs were released in the reserve to bolster its remaining population of 35 wild lemurs. The project was headquartered at the village of Rendrirendy. Support for the project from a number of zoos in the U.S., including the San Francisco Zoological Garden, had made it possible for a team of scientists to do short-term work in the reserve, and the team's presence had virtually eliminated ebony poaching, the real threat to the reserve. Supporting zoos were considering providing additional funds for new projects at the reserve. In order to provide accurate biological information to the public about high-profile groups of animals, several conservation groups of the AZA created their own World Wide Web sites. The AZA Felid Taxon Advisory Group (Felid TAG) launched a Web site at http://www.csew.com/felidtag. The specific objective of this site was to provide accurate, up-to-date information on those species of felids targeted by Felid TAG in its Regional Collection Plan (RCP) for captive management. The site provided individual fact sheets on species included in its RCP. The AZA Antelope Taxon Advisory Group also launched its own Web site. Located at http://www.antelopetag.org, this site provided similar information on those species of antelopes targeted by the group's RCP for captive management. The death in November of Hsing-Hsing, the male giant panda at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., who had been given to the U.S. in commemoration of Pres. Richard Nixon's trip to China in 1972, was widely mourned. Alan H. Shoemaker