HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!

Can you believe it's already 2006?  Well, it's time to make those resolutions and get busy planning and setting goals for this year.  I think I still have a few to carry over too!!!

A couple of months ago I received a free tree from Sierra Club...a blue spruce.  It's still very young so I put it on my kitchen window sill so it could recover from the trip through the post office...LOL!  It's now our holiday tree.  I can't wait to see it grow.  It's so cute.

LOOK WHO'S BEEN HIDING

The elusive ivory-billed woodpecker is still making news since it was rediscovered in 2004.  It made quite a splash on TV in October 2005 and you can still see the 60 Minutes broadcast online.  Check it out here.  The Big Woods Conservation Partnership which was formed in 2004 led by The Nature Conservancy and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology are continuing to work with other partners to conserve and restore the vital the habitat of the Big Woods of Arkansas, reforest degraded sites, restore sustainable form and function to major rivers, and reduce river sedimentation and pollution. 

WHO IS AMERICA'S OLDEST, LARGEST AND MOST INFLUENTIAL ENVIRONMENTAL ORGANIZATION?

It can only be the Sierra Club with over 750,000 members.  If you really want to be involved they have local chapters all over the United States, Canada and  Puerto Rico.  The Sierra Club programs also go Beyond Borders.  The current focus for Beyond Borders is the Mexico Project.  The goals are to "help these grassroots groups on the U.S.-Mexico border in their fight to protect the environment, to educate Sierra Club members about Mexican environment and environmental justice issues, and to involve Sierra Club volunteers in supporting Mexican environmental activism".

FIVE DECADES CONSERVING GLOBAL DIVERSITY OF LIFE

Twenty-five years ago China's panda was on the brink of extinction.  It took a quarter of a century but there are now an estimated 1,600 wild pandas and over 60 panda reserves thanks to the efforts of the World Wildlife Fund and China.  Protecting these temperate forest habitats not only helped the pandas but provided shelter for thousands of animals, 250 bird species and more than 100 mammals, as well as the water supply for 400 million Chinese people.  But the work is not done and WWF continues to work to stop biodiversity loss and freshwater degradation in China.  This is only one of the global challenges they have met and the list of endangered species is still challenged by human-wildlife conflicts.