Note at bottom how the “local authorities are not supportive”. Note also how the headline takes pains to say ‘some’ wildlife in Europe is rebounding…can you see how they are always hedging, always fighting, fighting against the positivity?
If one looks it’s quite easy to see how the nattily dressed, baby kissing politicians, at whatever level, do not have their constituents’ best interests at heart, despite professing otherwise – it’s been documented continuously in this thread.
The great news is how awareness and positive change spread at the most basic human level, by people making changes in their thinking, and their actions, on a mass level, across Society. A level where parasitic, controlling authorities are helpless to touch.
With the rising awareness taking place, the parasites are being noticed, more and more, and their influence is slipping, they are disappearing like frost on a spring morning.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/17/business/energy-environment/17iht-green17.html?_r=0)
A Rebound for Some Wildlife in Europe
Published: October 16, 2013
LONDON — A few years ago, the Iberian imperial eagle, a huge tawny raptor, died out in Portugal. But birds from Spain, where the species’ numbers have increased thanks to conservation efforts, quickly moved west, and there are now 12 breeding pairs in central Portugal.
“A lot of wildlife conservation is providing more information to people,” said Luísa Ferreira Nunes, a professor of wildlife ecology at the Polytechnic Institute of Castelo Branco in Portugal. “People in Portugal and Spain now understand that we have endemic species that only exist in Iberia,” she said. “They say, ‘These are our species. Let’s protect them.”’
Ms. Nunes said that hunters, whose guns make the Portuguese hillsides crackle on weekends, are pitching in to help the Iberian lynx, a big cat that is one of Europe’s rarest animals. The lynx had vanished from the western part of the Iberian Peninsula, but individual lynxes from Spain are crossing the border, and a successful Portuguese captive-breeding program is preparing for reintroductions.
Conservation does not have to be an exercise in frustration, according to a recently released study by researchers at the Zoological Society of London and BirdLife, a nonprofit organization based in Cambridge, England. Thanks in part to a variety of strategies, the European populations of a few dozen well-known mammal and bird species have increased in the past few decades, the researchers found.
Gray wolves, for instance, are becoming more numerous because of restrictions on shooting them and are moving west from their strongholds in Eastern Europe. There are an estimated 24 packs of the animals in Germany.
European bison, which resemble their North American cousins, were extinct in the wild in the early 20th century. Through breeding programs and reintroductions, the wild population, largely confined to Eastern Europe, now numbers about 3,000.
The study found that nearly 40 species, including white storks, griffon vultures and ibex, have made strong comebacks from low numbers in the past century. The once rare Eurasian beaver, which now is thought to number more than 300,000 in Europe alone, showed the strongest recovery of all.
The lesson is that conservation often works, the researchers said, especially for highly visible creatures for which the causes of decline, like hunting or damage to a particular nesting site, can be identified and addressed.
“When you eliminate threats, species are happy to come back,” said Monika Böhm, a researcher at the Zoological Society of London. “But you need to keep in mind that the big picture is not a good one.”
Conservationists say it is much more difficult to stem the effects of broad habitat degradation. Birds, for instance, appear to be in overall decline in Europe. “Those other species are declining primarily because of how society manages the landscape,” said Christina Ieronymidou, a researcher at BirdLife. “Providing artificial nests won’t help if the forest is being cut down.”
Frans Schepers, the managing director of Rewilding Europe, the organization that sponsored the study, argues that profound changes in European demographics present an enormous opportunity to let nature paint with a much broader brush.
Mr. Schepers’s organization — a partnership backed by the Dutch branch of the environmental group WWF and other organizations — has ambitious plans to allow enormous swaths of Europe that are gradually losing population to resume a more or less wild state.
Often the areas he focuses on are marginal farmland, where agriculture is becoming unprofitable and young people are moving to the cities. In particular, he is looking at parts of the Carpathian Mountains in Eastern Europe, the Danube Delta in Romania, the borderlands of Spain and Portugal, parts of Croatia and the central Apennine mountains in Italy.
Mr. Schepers does not want to buy big chunks of land, although Rewilding expects to make the occasional purchase. Instead, he hopes to persuade local people and governments that living in the midst of wild areas might be a better economic option than what they are doing now. One of the group’s proposals is to develop local eco-tourism industries. In each of the zones, the goal is to stitch together 100,000 hectares, or 250,000 acres, of land, eventually reaching a million hectares across Europe.
Mr. Schepers contends that these areas, instead of being written off as social and economic dead zones, could become centers of new economies based on the wildlife and flora they contain.
“The way you start is not to create protected areas,” he said, but to work slowly to win people over at the grass-roots level. “If people start seeing value and that they can even earn money from it,” then things can take off, he said.
Business suggestions include nature safaris and sustainable forestry. In Croatia, the group is even considering buying a local hunting business to persuade the clientele to forgo shooting rare animals like bears and chamois while continuing to hunt creatures that are more numerous, like wild boars.
In the border zones of eastern Portugal and western Spain, Rewilding’s local partners want to start a safari business that will take day trippers from Lisbon to see wolves, vultures and the Iberian lynx, once it returns to the area.
In the Danube Delta, the group is beginning work with the village of Sfantu Gheorghe, which is in a scenic area of marshland, lagoons and villages with traditional wooden structures.
Alexandra Panait, a Rewilding representative in Bucharest, explained that the group wants to “generate more financial resources for the local people,” providing seed money for ecologically sound businesses like bird-watching and reed weaving.
Rewilding wants to help reintroduce beavers in the area around Sfantu Gheorghe, as well as help the village gain rights to a 7,000-hectare preserve. The idea is that the residents will earn money from tourists and so have more of a stake in preserving their surroundings.
This new concept is not always an easy sell. The local authorities “have not been very supportive so far,” Ms. Panait said. “They are a little bit old-fashioned in the way of managing reserves.”
