Lyle Lewis

Some ecological changes are easy to see. Wolves returned to Yellowstone and became an international story. Lake trout arrived in Yellowstone Lake and quietly reorganized an ecosystem. One became a symbol. The other remained largely invisible. My latest for Mongabay:

The Second Resurrection. Not as famous as the first. New essay Thursday.

Mounting evidence suggests that night is darker than day.

A bison stampede loses some of its luster amid roads, vehicles, fences, and tourists. A glimpse of an ancient spectacle in a thoroughly modern landscape.

“When Burmese pythons became established in So. FL, they entered a system that had no experience w/ them….Across large portions of the Everglades, populations of mid-sized mammals collapsed. Bobcats declined sharply. Raccoons & opossums nearly disappeared. The change wasn’t gradual. It was abrupt.”

“Learning begins with individuals, not populations. A single successful interaction doesn’t change a system. But repeated encounters become experience. Predators are not just instinct; they are memory in motion. What we may be seeing now is not control, but recognition”

The Everglades isn’t solving pythons. It’s learning them—while everything else is changing. New Essay: What Happens When an Ecosystem Has to Learn Too Fast

Florida has a python problem. BBC Wildlife says scientists may have found a “solution.” But when does reducing an invasive species become equivalent to reversing the ecological damage it has caused? A new essay tomorrow.

The system is trying to learn while the rules keep changing. New Essay Sunday: What Happens When an Ecosystem Has to Learn Too Fast

We ease the strain on the grid by destroying the environment.

I can’t imagine why. 🙄

The Surge in Commercial Real-Estate Deals Is Blowing Up Biodiversity

The ramifications of El Nino discussed on Science Talk. Reality isn’t our friend . youtu.be/qZFGvCgynok

Mountaintop removal. Garbage mountain creation. Geologically, it’s give and take. Ecologically, it’s take and take.

Plastic does not biodegrade but instead bioaccumulates and biomagnifies aka mass extinction. Recycling works only once, if at all, and it releases even more microplastics and introduces new toxic vectors no animal should ever touch. We have long crossed safe limits. pubs.acs.org/esthag/artic...

Bears, whales, sea turtles, albatrosses, shearwaters. All documented dying from our garbage. We throw things away. But there is no away. Global plastic waste projected to nearly triple by 2060, creating an increasingly dangerous world for everything.

starting with Lionfish souffle and Python pancakes, I hope? Maybe a Himalayan blackberry/Ivy/Holly leaf salad?

Free recipes! Introducing The Climate Cookbook — delicious new ways to make the most of a warming planet. Bon appétit!

Just the thousands of organisms killed or displaced—and the people who advocate for them.

First we threw rocks. Then we set fires. Then we threw spears. Then we fired guns. Then we dropped bombs. Then we created AI. Two and a half million years of technological progress. The weapons change. The animal wielding them doesn’t.

The Sixth Mass Extinction began when a primate picked up a rock and realized it worked. Sometimes we go back to our roots.

Pangolins are among the most trafficked mammals on Earth. But wildlife trafficking affects more than 2,200 spices already considered threatened or Near Threatened. Apparently there is almost nothing alive that humans cannot turn into a commodity.

#Canada is soooo different than the US… The good guys. www.cbc.ca/player/play/...

Oil-sands expansion. Jasper and the Rockies. Salmon watersheds. A new deepwater terminal near Vancouver. More tankers through endangered killer-whale habitat. We have a remarkable talent for calling economic benefits “national interest” and ecological costs “impacts.”

Enchiladas have now joined parking spaces, loud music, video games and chicken sandwiches on the list of things humans have killed one another over. Homo sapiens remains one of the more aspirational names in taxonomy.

Checking 4 #butterflies along #dykeapproach path, by 12:30 thought colder nights had taken them all .. but foiled again as by 13:30, they'd emerged from their dry & cosy upside-down roosts for 5-minute meals in native blooms & 2-second snacks in the American Daisies. #grownativeplants4insects 1/2

Interesting conversation with the Co-Director of the Climate Majority Project. youtu.be/ocpTV62fUQs?...

We cannot uninvent ourselves. We cannot uninvent what we already know. The central problem of the technological age may be that every generation inherits more powerful tools—but essentially the same animal.

Since 2012, at least 2,375 people have been killed or disappeared defending land and the environment. Sometimes protecting wildlife means protecting it from habitat loss, mining, logging or poaching. Sometimes it means protecting it from other people.

New essay Sunday about what happens when a Paleolithic animal acquires tools powerful enough to reshape the planet—and competition makes those tools impossible to abandon.

Yellowstone has been slumbering for 600,000 years. Humanity has been sleepwalking through a mass extinction. I know which one I’d rather see wake up.

Imagine owning a fleet of cars you can’t afford to maintain. Tires are bald. Brakes need replacing. Half the check-engine lights are on. Your solution? Buy more cars. That’s essentially the argument for building more roads in our national forests.

We’ll pay attention to nature. It just needs to be cute, funny, competitive, or preferably all three. Fat Bear Week: prominent news. Environmental collapse: keep scrolling.

“Utilizing Landscape Restoration to Build Sustainable Socio-Ecological Systems.” Somewhere along the way, conservation stopped being about protecting wild places and became a competition to see who could say almost nothing while sounding extraordinarily important.

With 8.3 billion people on the planet, we’ve learned to define wildlife recovery so narrowly that we can celebrate a species’ comeback even as the ecosystem supporting it continues to unravel.

How one conniving beast undermined humanity’s concerted effort to live in harmony with nature. New essay: How Mountain Lions Destroyed the West

Colorado’s wolf population has “stalled” at 45. Colorado is roughly 104,000 square miles. That works out to about one wolf for every 2,300 square miles. And we’re already debating how many of them need to be killed.

What makes this quote even more interesting is Einstein wrote this during World War I, decades before nuclear weapons.

Technology allows humans to dissipate concentrated energy and reorganize matter at rates that biological systems cannot repair.

People often underestimate the oversized role predators play in ecosystems. New essay Sunday: How Mountain Lions Destroyed the West

Technology viewed by itself produces a remarkable story of human progress. Compare with the curves for atm. CO₂, material extraction, habitat conversion, synthetic chemicals, and biodiversity loss and it produces a remarkable story of a species liquidating its future.

Wildfire isn’t erasing forests. We are. We’ve altered climate, fuels, vegetation, and fire regimes until fires push ecosystems across ecological thresholds. Forests become shrublands. Shrublands become annual grasslands. Diverse plant communities become near-monocultures.

A rare article about human population that is refreshingly short on delusion.

Good news: experts have produced a definitive framework for sustainability, resilience, transformation, adaptation, and several other excellent things. My new Substack essay:

Traffic interferes with bird communication, territory defense, mate attraction and predator detection. Nature increasingly has to justify itself by providing a measurable human benefit.

We’re concerned about the scenery. The trees are concerned about surviving a changing climate.

We may finally have solved climate change, biodiversity loss, and social instability.
 My new essay:

We may finally have a comprehensive framework for solving climate change, biodiversity loss, and social instability. The only remaining challenge is figuring out what any of the words mean. Check out my new Substack essay in the morning.