The World is not perfect

In every corner of the world, people are poaching, stealing, selling and buying protected species. Wildlife trafficking and forest crime is worth at least $17 billion a year worldwide, which makes it such a big industry that it's impossible to encapsulate its breadth in one or a dozen posts. Rhino poaching in South Africa has increased 50-fold in the last five years. 30 percent of the world's timber comes from illegal sources. More than 5,400 endangered Asian big cats have been poached since 2000. And in many of those cases, the millions and billions made are being funneled into the pockets of criminals, corrupt officials, and militants. Humans beings have the awesome ability to take any experience of their lives and create a meaning; aldo they have a great understanding of their own capabilities to destroy
themselves when necessary.

Supporting the above organizations is a start, but more than that, the trade won't go away until more people are made aware of how destructive it is. Spread the word, folks.
Long admired for his work on language and cognition, the latest book by the Harvard professor Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature, was a panoramic sweep through history. Marshalling a huge range of evidence, Pinker argued that humanity has become less violent over time. As with Pinkers previous books, it sparked fierce debate. Whether writing about evolutionary psychology, linguistics or history, what unites Pinkers work is a fascination with human nature and an enthusiasm for sharing new discoveries in accessible, elegant prose.

The Rhino Horn Crisis and the Darknet

Sometime last fall, I logged into an underground message board in the anonymized recesses of the Internet they call the darknet in search of rhinoceros horn. Once thought to posess magical abilities, and now used primarily for supposed medicinal purposes across Asia, rhino horn is now an incredibly rare commodity that's worth more than cocaine, gold, or platinum. In Southeast Asia, a single horn--ripped from the head of a dead rhinoceros by a poacher working for a crime syndicate--can sell for half a million dollars or more. After I posted my request, plenty of people wrote back, though it wasn't clear who was trying to sell and who was trying to scam. But one respondent sounded more serious. His email handle was "Keros," the Greek word for horn, and he dismissed my request as amateurish, explaining that the horn trade isn't something to take lightly. "Anyway," he wrote, "my material is black rhino horn pure keratin hunted in Namibia. I have three in the US right now."

As strange as it sounds, the international rhino horn trade has, like everything else, gone digital. Last year, a nationwide law enforcement sting called Operation Crash netted seven individuals, including a Texas rodeo star who'd been making horn deals via Facebook. That bust marked a rising trend for the sale of an item that can fetch $90,000 or more per kilogram. Enforcement has cracked down on overt sales in the U.S., but vendors have taken a cue from the drug trade and moved deeper into the Internet. Alongside heroin and MDMA, rhino horn is now being advertised through the impossible-to-trace connections of the darknet. The illegal wildlife trade, including the sale of exotic animals and the parts of endangered species, has exploded in recent years to become a massive black market worth some $20 billion a year. Fueled by booming Asian economies and organized crime, African paramilitary groups, and appetites for exotica in the US, the trade is threatening some of the world's rarest and most charismatic species. That includes tigers and elephants, as well as lesser-known species like pangolins, all of which have seen their numbers decline due in part to poaching. But the growth of the trade is best exemplified by the demand for rhino horn, which is falsely believed to have medicinal and psychoactive properties. According to the World Wildlife Fund, the past twelve months have seen the worst spate of rhino poaching in recent memory. Poachers have become notably more militarized, while rangers, despite the growing use of drones and other surveillance tech, have struggled to catch up. South Africa, which is home to the vast majority of Africa's white rhinoceroses and just under half of black rhinos, saw the bulk of rhino poaching activity. The increase in poaching, fueled by skyrocketing prices for rhino horn, reflects a preceding increase in demand. Whether they use it for traditional medicine or, more recently, as a party drug, buyers are paying more for horn than ever, and theyre being supplied by organized crime, speculators, and corrupt officials, who have connected through crime rings and the Web to develop a global wildlife trade network. A total of 668 rhinos were killed in South Africa in 2012, up nearly 50 percent from 2011. In 2008, only 83 animals were illegally killed. (Rhino hunting is still legal in South Africa, and trophy horns are legal for personal possession, which has complicated enforcement immensely.) Since 2007, poaching in South Africa is up by a staggering 3000 percent. For both white and black rhinos, the huge increase in poaching threatens to derail what has been an otherwise hopeful narrative about conservation. The IUCN Red List, the leading global assessment of species vulnerability, lists the black rhino as critically endangered, after the wild population declined by an estimated 97.6% since 1960 to a low of 2,410 in 1995. Since then, the population has trended upwards, with an estimated 4,880 individuals in the wild at the end of 2010. Thats still a stunningly low number. The southern white rhino, one of two white rhinoceros subspecies, was hunted down to a population of only 20-50 individuals by the end of the 19th century, all isolated in South Africa. But aggressive conservation and reintroduction of individuals to former ranges helped boost the wild population to 20,160 in 2010. After South Africa, the rest of the wild population is concentrated mostly in Kenya, Namibia and Zimbabwe.

As for the northern subspecies, in 2003 the only confirmed wild population stood at a paltry 30 individuals in the Garamba National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo. A 2006 survey only confirmed four individuals remained, and by now its presumed that the subspecies is extinct. To blame are poachers, who in many cases, especially in the DRC, are militant groups looking to cash in on the lucrative trade. In both major wildlife trades in Africa, for rhino horn and elephant ivory, militants have begun to take over. Its a matter of economics; horn and ivory prices are higher than ever, which has lured paramilitary groups into the lucrative slaughter. On the other side are wildlife rangers, who in Kenya, South Africa, and elsewhere are often underfunded, understaffed, and left facing poachers who have evolved from roving packs of hunter bandits into groups who are skilled at navigating the bush and who are also extremely efficient killers. The New York Times has called ivory the newest conflict resource in Africa, and noted that some of Africas most notorious armed groups, including the Lords Resistance Army, the Shabab and Darfurs janjaweed, are hunting down elephants and using the tusks to buy weapons and sustain their mayhem. While northern white rhinos have disappeared, Garamba National Park is still home to a number of elephants, and because poachers are now often hard-core combatants, rangers have become more heavily armed. While in the US we may envision wildlife rangers as looking something like Ranger Smith, those in Africa are equipped with machine guns and RPGs, and regularly find themselves in deadly confrontations. In Kenya, even civilians have armed themselves to protect elephants. For South Africas rhinos, its a similar situation. In November, following a rash of rhino killings in the South African province of North West, an anti-corruption investigative force known as the Hawks arrested a trio of men, including a park ranger, for their involvement in the rhino trade. That incident prompted Thandi Modise, the regions premier, to request that the South African military step in for technical and staff support in the provinces reserves. The South African armys technical support was part of a shift towards the use of surveillance tech in conservation. Drones, which are cheaper than ever thanks to the U.S. militarys decade-plus of development along with a new private drone economy, have become popular in ecology and conservation efforts. Ecologists working with orangutans were notable early adopters, with drones offering the ability to fly over forests for surveys far cheaper than manned flights could ever be. Drones are making their way into the wildlife trade as well. Google recently gave the WWF $5 million for drones to protect wildlife in Africa and Asia, while a number of other conservation groups have been getting into the drone game. Clive Vivier, a 65 year old rhino farmer and co-founder of the Zululand rhino reserve in South Africa, recently received permission from the U.S. State Department to buy Arcturus T-20 drones, which feature 17foot wingspans, 16 hour flight times, and which are used by the Navy.

"It can tell whether a man is carrying a shovel or firearm and whether he has his finger on the trigger or not," Vivier told the Guardian. "We can see the poacher but he can't see us. We're good at arresting them when we know where they are. Otherwise it's a needle in a haystack." Vivier is still looking for funding. He estimates that two years of flying will cost $300,000 per drone, and wants to slate 10 of the drones for South Africas Kruger park, where at least 400 animals were killed last year, with another 20 aircraft spread out amongst the rest of South Africas parks. That would put the bill at around $4.5 million a year, which isnt anything to sneeze at. But considering how much ground they can cover, theyre magnitudes cheaper than manned surveillance flights or rangers in Land Rovers searching for traces of poachers. As drones get cheaper, nature reserve surveillance is only going to get more high tech. ***** While the situation in Africa has taken a turn for the worse, the money fueling the trade isnt coming from locals. Demand for ivory and horn has been fueled largely by Asia, where buyers looking for traditional medicines, hangover cures, and what basically amounts to exotic animal bling are pumping cash into the industry. While China is still the worlds largest market for wildlife parts, which include the big trio of ivory, horn, and tiger parts, the country has made efforts in recent years to crack down illegal trade and fall into line with international regulations. According to the WWFs 2012 Wildlife Crime Report Card (PDF), China has made general progress in key aspects of compliance and enforcement when it comes to tigers and rhinos, but it failing in some aspects of the ivory trade. The worlds worst culprit, according to the WWF, is Vietnam. The country is failing or lacking in meeting almost all CITES wildlife conventions and regulations, which means it is more or less a lawless space for wildlife trafficking. Because of that, and efforts by China to crack down on the trade, Vietnam has turned into a global hub for parts coming out of Africa and, in the case of tigers and Asian elephants, the rest of Asia to later be sold region- and worldwide. That huge hole in the enforcement net, matched to a lesser extent by Thailand, is a major reason that the trade can still exist, as the WWF notes in the report: Major gaps in enforcement at the retail market level are primarily responsible for the failing scores in destination countries, while Egypt, Thailand and Viet Nam fail for key areas of compliance as well. It is critical that demand countries, including China, Thailand and Viet Nam, urgently and dramatically improve enforcement effort to crack down on illegal wildlife trade in their countries... International wildlife crime is demand-driven, and it is recommended that China and Viet Nam, in particular, prioritize the development and implementation of well-researched demand reduction campaigns. Targeted strategies should be developed to influence consumer behaviour around tiger parts, rhino horn, and ivory of illegal origin. In October, just as poaching levels in South Africa had reached a record high, with 455 rhinos killed since the beginning of the year, eclipsing last year's figure of 448, Vietnam rejected a law-enforcement and biodiversity agreement with South Africa aimed at curbing poaching.

Rather than cracking down on the trade, officials in Vietnam are known to be actively partaking. Its gotten to the point that Vietnamese officials and politicians prefer tiger bone paste and rhino horn to cash bribes. Nowadays, bribes for officials are disguised in the forms of not only gifts, luxury vacations and cars, but also rhino horns, bear bile, or tiger bone paste, Le Nhu Tien, vice chairman of the Vietnamese National Assemblys Committee on Culture, Education, Youth, and Children, told Vietweek in October.

Horn use has recently become popular among Vietnams nouveau riche and political elite as a party drug, to be mixed with wine.
Rhino horn was once sold as a snake oil cancer cure, with customers basically fed false hope and swindled. But horn use has recently become popular among Vietnams nouveau riche and political elite as a party drug mixed with wine, or ground up and mixed into a tincture as a hangover cure. People actually have rhino horn tonic parties. They will use it to give them a boost, Crawford Allan, the North American director of WWF's Traffic wildlife trade monitoring network, told me in a phone interview. I met last fall with the Vietnamese officials responsible for this in their country, and they told me that rhino horn, in the wealthy elite, is being used as a hangover cure. They go out and get drunk every night, and they have to go to work in the morning, so theyll take a shot of $400 rhino hangover cure, and that helps them through the day. Rhino horn is made of keratin, the same as your fingernails, and has absolutely zero medicinal or psychoactive properties. That means people are getting about as high off horn as they would if they snorted ground up $100 bills. The difference is, you can always print more cash. In short, the trade has ballooned thanks to growing economies in Southeast Asia and China, where the newly wealthy, corrupt officials, and a booming middle class now can afford strange highs and expensive traditional therapies. And just as rising prices have attracted more sophisticated, militant groups to poaching, its also attracted organized crime. If youve envisioned the wildlife trade as being similar to the drug trade, you wouldnt be far off. Organized crime syndicates worldwide now control much of the wildlife trade, and in many cases have parlayed the very trade networks and smuggling techniques developed for drug smuggling into moving animal parts around the globe. The phenomenon was described in a paper by Elizabeth Bennett of the World Conservation Society, which showed that budgets for enforcement efforts and conservation groups lag far behind the resources available to crime groups. That, combined with the ability of mob

groups to bribe and intimidate officials, has left enforcement struggling to keep up with the trade on the sell side. We are failing to conserve some of the worlds most beloved and charismatic species, Bennett said in a statement accompanying the paper. We are rapidly losing big, spectacular animals to an entirely new type of trade driven by criminalized syndicates. It is deeply alarming, and the world is not yet taking it seriously. When these criminal networks wipe out wildlife, conservation loses, and local people lose the wildlife on which their livelihoods often depend. Mob influence extends beyond just the wildlife trade, and is also fueling a huge market in illegal logging that may make up to 30 percent of the global trade in hardwoods. In Laos, cronyism and smuggling by Vietnamese officials is responsible for a huge illegal logging industry, which is robbing Laos of its valuable hardwood resources with little payoff. But its the wildlife trade thats inflated most rapidly in the last decade. To gain a sense of the size, note that enforcement officials are now recording record busts while simultaneously watching the trade grow beyond what is currently enforceable. And as if the sheer volume of the trade wasnt enough, the criminals running the trade continue to buy themselves protection. In fact, enforcement actions and seizures in Southeast Asia have increased 10-fold in six years. On January 5, more than 27 kilos of Rhino horn worth an estimated US$1.4 million were seized by airport officials in Thailand and Vietnam: a 56-year-old Vietnamese man was arrested at Bangkoks main airport after six pieces of horn, weighing about 10.6 kilos, were found in luggage he left on the baggage carousel after arriving from Ethiopia. The same day in Ho Chi Minh City in southern Vietnam, customs officers confiscated six pieces of rhino horn weighing some 16.5 kilos from a 33-year-old Vietnamese man who had smuggled the horn from Mozambique via Doha and Bangkok. But, as is the case with drugs, the Mr. Bigs of the trade continue to evade capture, and in many cases are openly able to take advantage of corruption, as the AP noted last August: Recently, Lt. Col. Adtaphon Sudsai, a highly regarded, outspoken [Vietnamese police] officer, was instructed to lay off what had seemed an open-and-shut case he cracked four years ago when he penetrated a gang along the Mekong River smuggling pangolin. This led him to Mrs. Daoreung Chaimas, alleged by conservation groups to be one of Southeast Asia's biggest tiger dealers. Despite being arrested twice, having her own assistants testify against her and DNA testing that showed two cubs were not offsprings from zoo-bred parents as she claimed, Daoreung remains free and the case may never go to the prosecutor's office. Although theyre home to the highest-profile consumers, itd be erroneous to think that the trade is limited to Vietnam and the rest of Southeast Asia. In 2011, a gang in Ireland became notorious in 2011 for robbing museums of horns from stuffed rhinos. Known as the Rathkeale Rovers, they sourced horns by targeting auction houses, private dealers and collectors, museums, and even zoos. (In response, a number of museums throughout Europe replaced their stuffed rhinos horns with fiberglass replicas, along with signs that said something to the effect of Dont steal me, Im fake.)

By robbing auction houses and private dealers, the gang has been able to exploit loopholes in international bans on horn trading that, in some circumstances, allow for the sale of antiques and trophy mounts. At lot of the time the trade in rhino horn is taking place through auction houses, where theyre selling old trophy mounts, for example, Allan said. People who arent buying for a trophy, but who are then buying it to smuggle it out of the country to countries like Vietnam, where the demand is so high and the price is so high. Keeping the global trade connected iswhat else?the Internet. In Asia, it should come as no surprise that as the trade has been legitimized by rampant corruption, its also headed online, where sellers can more easily reach buyers. Because demand still outpaces supply, the online marketplace has also helped push prices higher. We know certainly in Asia, or in Vietnam for example, the web is rife with advertising offering to sell rhino horn, Allan said. Theres very little fear of being prosecuted or detected.

"[The web] makes it easy, and those transactions often happen fairly quickly. The reality of it is that no agency has a large enough enforcement force to track everything that goes on in the internet."
The U.S. also boasts a massive online trade, which has made enforcement difficult. The Endangered Species Act, which regulates most of the wildlife trade, only prohibits interstate and international commerce. That means that not all possession, or even sales, of banned items is illegal in the US. Pre-internet, selling something as rare as a rhino horn would be done either through auction houses, or through private trade, but putting out an ad in the local paper wasn't exactly going to reach a lot of buyers. Now a huge market is open to sellers, some of whom don't even know what they're doing is illegal, and tracking all of those markets is pretty much impossible. "You have the issue of the individual seller, who tries to take advantage of Craigslist or eBay, possibly without really being aware that theyre violating laws, depending on what theyre selling," Sandra Cleva of the Fish and Wildlife Service told me. "It makes it easy, and those transactions often happen fairly quickly. The reality of it is that no agency has a large enough enforcement force to track everything that goes on in the internet." That point was underscored last year by a pair of high-profile busts. First came Operation Cyberwild, a Fish and Wildlife operation in Southern California that netted a dozen arrests for people selling various illegal wildlife productsfrom turtle boots to live fishover Craigslist.

The sale of endangered animals on the Internet has reached an alarming level, with as much as two-thirds of such sales taking place in the United States, U.S. Attorney Andr Birotte, Jr. said at the time. These Internet sales of wildlife fuel poaching and make the killing of protected animals more profitable. Around the same time, federal agents from Fish and Wildlife, the Department of Homeland Security, and the IRS were putting the final touches on Operation Crash, named after the term for a group of rhinos. Seven people, including the aforementioned Texas cowboy, were arrested in the first wave, which netted 37 horns (worth $10 million or more) and millions of dollars worth of assets. "What were seeing here in the States with respect to rhino horns are people cashing in on them once theyre already here, because people now have an opportunity to sell them for considerable amounts of money," Cleva said. "And there are those who tend to export their horns overseas to really magnify their profit, which is what the two gentlemen in Los Angeles were doing." The operation is ongoing, and at last count a total of 12 people have been arrested, including a pair of the Rathkeale Rovers. Rhino horn is worth more than gold, but its still being traded online, so I had to ask: How hard is it really to get? Theres little chance of finding it on Craigslist, and itd take a real stroke of strange luck for me to end up finding someone who dabbles in horn through Facebook. But it's a numbers game. Cleva told me that Fish and Wildlife has three intelligence analysts who do Internet research, and even with 300, there's simply no way to monitor the entire web for such a rare product. After trying to scour websites for examples of rhino horn sales, it became rather obvious that I faced the same problem. But there is another option to the regular old Internet: the Tor network, an anonymity service used to access an isolated portion of the Internet thats more secure and more lawless than the net youre currently connected to. Tor stands for The Onion Router, and connects solely to the pseudo-top-level domain .onion, which differs from .com, .net, and all the other regular domain suffixes by not being an official part of the Domain Naming System. So while .onion sites are part of the global network that makes up the Internet, theyre not accessible through Google or any of the rest of the regular web as we know it. Onion routing works by bouncing your requests all over the world, similar to how that Russian dude in Goldeneye hides his own browsing. While .onion has been around since 2004, the creation of the anonymous currency Bitcoin in 2009 helped give the .onion web a reputation as a marketplace for all kinds of illicit goods. At the forefront is the Silk Road, an online bazaar where you can buy just about any street drug you can think of from anonymous vendors and have it shipped anywhere in the world, along with porn, regular old classifieds, and for a short time, even firearms through the Silk Roads sister site The Armory. As enticing as that may sound, navigating the Tor network is a major pain in the ass. Load times are extremely slow, as data get routed all over the world, and .onion addresses forgo

names, such as http://silkroad.onion, for complicated and impossible to remember bits of gibberish, like http://kpvz7ki2v5agwt35.onion. The vast majority of data in the Tor network and deep web is basically just that: data thats more or less inaccessible because theres no road map to get to it. The sites and data that are useful, or at least interesting, arent easy to stumble upon. What search engines exist, they dont have the finesse of Google, and mostly produce gobbledegook for results. The addresses of popular sites like the Silk Road are no secret, and can be easily found on the regular web. But for someone rooting around for something or other, the incredible lag time and purely DIY aesthetic make browsing a brain-numbing chore. And even if you have the right address, it wont always work. For a first-timer, there is one go-to source for help, known as the Hidden Wiki. Its basically just a huge list of links (an old screenshot is available here) to various sites of interest: Blogs and chat rooms for the types of folks youd expect to be chilling in such a place revolutionaries, anarchists, anyone that doesnt dig The Manalong with lists of music repositories, drug outlets, and a number of links to various types of hardcore, and sometimes illegal, porn. I think that sums up the Tor network best; the Web today, while still filled with porn and gore sites, is relatively clean. Nowhere during your average surf session nowadays, especially as we spend more time clicking on links from social media than randomly browsing, are you going to be a single click away from sites hosting bestiality and jailbait porn. But sites linked to by the Hidden Wiki claim to offer exactly that, although I'm not going to try and confirm. I wanted to find a source who had at some point dealt in the online horn trade, as I wanted to get a little more insight into how it worked. The Silk Road had, amongst all its other wares, weed and heroin, but no horn and thus no one to talk to. Outside of the marketplaces, there are two other prominent options: Contact one of various listings for procurement servicespeople who claim they can get almost anythingas well as message boards that work as free-form classifieds, and which include buy-sell offers for myriad illicit goods. Its tough to have much confidence in the procurement services, especially when theyre listed alongside people claiming to be hitmen, but I found one with good reviews whose site loudly proclaimed it was based in Israel and could get anything. I sent them an email via a Tor email account saying that I was looking for information about the horn market, and posted something similar on one of the classifieds boards. The alleged Israeli service got back to me within a few days, and said that horn was something they could easily get. They said their going rate for a horn picked up in China was $18,000 a kilo, which was (and still is) below market price. I tried to get some more info on why the horn was relatively cheap and how they'd acquire it, but probably because it was clear I wasn't actually interested in buying said horn, they stopped responding. Soon after I put up the message board post, and in the months since, Ive occasionally gotten random emails from people saying they've got their hands on horn. Most sound like this first one, which happens to be my favorite:

A thief who deals in exquisite items! Now that sounds like some intrigue. After emails like that, I figured the search was fruitless. I wasn't a buyer, and it's no surprise that people wouldn't want to talk to someone bumbling about so bluntly. But one guy whod written to me early on pulled a surprising move: After telling him the procurement service said they could somehow score discount horn, this guy basically said I was being an idiot for thinking that was how the market worked. Not only that, but he wrote back to tell me how he does business: Man, this is why i ask this question. You only have to read the news to know, Im selling right now at almost 62K per kilo intact horns and sections at 72K per kilo (average section is about .52 to .66 kg) I dont sell powder. If anyone is trying to sell at this ridiculous price is probably trying to scam you, and i repeat you can search for news in google and youll see my prices are the right. Anyway my material is black rhino horn pure keratin hunted in Namibia. I have three in the US right now: ---82cm (32 inch) and 5.435 kg at 330K US dollars ---52cm (20.3 inch) and 2.918 kg at 180K US dollars ---37.3 cm (14.5 inch) and 2.188 kg at 135K US dollars I will do sections for the smaller one, and the extra cost is because for me is more difficult to sell it in this way. I only accept bitcoins, and of course accept full escrow. I also can work outside full escrow, in 50% upfront and two bitcoins payments, or 20% bitcoins in first, and silver or gold in second. The horn or section can be shipped to an address or to a drop point. If you are in NY, i suppose youll have it in three days tops once the payment is done. I wrote him back asking how exactly he makes such massive transactions with strangers online, and found that bitcoin escrow services are a real thing, which does open up the possibility for trading ridiculous amounts of bitcoin with at least some sort of guarantee. He never responded to that query, but followed up by saying he had an offer for two of the horns. I lost contact after that. Was it the real deal? I of course cant be sure, and my admittedly clumsy way of searching for horn had already filled my inbox with scammers. But the details were right, and talking to Allan, the prices were about what one would expect. "The guy asking $180,000 for a single horn, that may be the real deal," Allan said. "Maybe he does have something real to sell." Real or not, there are two takeaways: First, the rhino horn trade is indeed popular and lucrative enough that people didn't bat an eye at discussing its sale, regardless of whether

they were scammers or not. (For example, I doubt I would have received similarly enthusiastic responses to queries about exotic, illegal fish.) Second is the sheer simplicity of it. Rhino horn is an incredibly rare and exotic material, one that would be pretty much impossible for the average Joe to pick up through offline means. Assuming I had a mountain of bitcoins, an escrow service I could trust, and a desire for horn, attempting a buy through the dark web would be the next easiest thing to going to South Africa and hunting a rhino in person. There's another facet to the case that's complicating the trade worldwide: While the act of selling the horn through the web is illegal, the guy's possession of it may not be. "Now, the question must be that it may be a legally acquired horn," Allan said. "It might be an antique thats been held for a hundred years in the U.S. sitting on someones wall as a trophy. It may be a legal horn. But once that person starts to sell it and trade it, and goes across state lines, thats where offenses start to come in if its not done through the proper means." So diving into Tor isn't even necessary. Unlike a guy with a brick of cocaine, someone who's had a horn in the family for years could ostensibly throw it up for sale online without realizing it's illegal, which is an issue authorities regularly have to deal in the wildlife trade, although horn is a much rarer case. But the opposite of that scenario is also realistic: Someone starts reaching out to trophy hunters and the like looking for horn, which had been legally acquired, and buys it up for cheap to sell in Asia. This is what the cowboy on Facebook did. ***** Forays into the dark web aside, one giant final question remains: How does one stop the trade? Unsurprisingly, shutting down the wildlife trade has been fraught with difficulties, a lack of resources, and various theories about legalization, just like the drug trade it mirrors. The most basic step to combat the trade is to increase support for awareness and enforcement efforts. That combination truly works, as evidenced online. A few years ago, you might have been able to find elephant ivory on eBay labeled as an antique or as oxbone, but efforts from advocacy groups helped push the auction site to crack down on wildlife products. (Oxbone products still aren't banned by eBay, although most of them are fake ivory anyway. But if you search for the highest-priced oxbone listings, you can occasionally find what appears to be ivory, which often is listed as antique even if it's from recently-killed elephants.) Even Craigslist, which has much more of a hands-off policy on listings, has seen a decline in overt posts for wildlife products thanks to enforcement efforts like Fish and Wildlife's Cyberwild operation. Of course, the Internet is still a major tool of the trade, and not simply for communication. While not necessarily the case with horn, many people who buy banned wildlife products dont realize (or are misled by vendors) that theyre buying something illegal. Eliminating products from the surface Web helps cut down on that sector of the trade. In the U.S. and Europe, online enforcement has helped prevent illegal items from being easily found and purchased.

In Southeast Asia, online markets are much more lax about vendor restrictions, especially when it comes to wildlife products. Tightening enforcement in that space is key to limiting access to the trade. In the case of rhino horns newfound status as a luxury item, pushing the trade further underground can help prevent people from buying into the latest fad. "Theres the mentality of people that consider consuming endangered wildlife goes against the grain, goes against societys norms and is something cool and radical to do," Allan said. "Thats obviously just wrong. We know that its certainly happening in a few countries in Asia. If it spreads, its a much bleaker picture than you would even imagine. We hope thats not the case." As the online trade gets pushed deeper into the Web, catching and prosecuting buyers and sellers gets increasingly difficult. And, as weve seen with the drug trade, completely preventing people from selling illicit products is impossible. But stepping up enforcement efforts and forcing trade networks as far away from the mainstream as possible can help suck some of the demand out of the wildlife trade bubble thats encouraging criminal enterprises to get into the business in the first place. On the supply side, equipping rangers and wildlife managers with better surveillance and monitoring technology goes a long way to solve the age-old problem of poaching: In the vastness of wildlife parks, poachers are tiny, and finding them with limited manpower before they strike is a Herculean task. While 20,000 rhinos living in the wild isnt a large population from an ecological standpointespecially if 700 to 1,000 of them are being killed a yearit is a huge number when youre trying to keep track of them. The rise of drones in wildlife management is fascinating, as its a rather perfect application of the technology. Ranger budgets are chronically underfunded, and time spent trying to track down poachers is costly. Drones are relatively cheap to fly, can cover much more ground, and with military-grade surveillance tools, can search for poachers more effectively than rangers on the ground or on manned flights.

The quasi-legality of horn has caused incredible trouble for enforcement officials worldwide.
For rhinos specifically, theres a huge benefit to be found in bringing coherence to the convoluted regulations protecting them. In South Africa, foreigners are still legally able to hunt rhino, as long as their horns are mounted and shipped home as personal trophies. Proponents argue that the white rhino population in South Africa is large enough to sustainably allow hunts, but the legality of some rhino hunting has opened huge loopholes for poachers. For example, in November a Thai man was handed a 40-year jail sentence by a South African court for setting up fake hunts to gather horns. According to court documents, the man paid Thai prostitutes around $800 apiece to pose next to dead rhinos with small-caliber (read: not

able to kill a rhino) rifles that had been shot by other people at game farms. A total of 26 rhinos were killed, whose horns the man shipped back to Asia, not as personal trophies, but for profit. The quasi-legality of horn has caused incredible trouble for enforcement officials worldwide. Busting someone with a kilo of cocaine is a simple arrest, but someone may be traveling with rhino horn thats been legally acquired, whether as a personal trophy or an antique mount, that may or may not then be sold. A standardized licensing system could go a long way to clearing up that confusion, whether serial numbers are etched into horns or ID tags are embedded in legal horns. More importantly, South Africa needs to figure out what, if any, rationale it has for continuing rhino hunts to continue. Its rather difficult to get tough on poaching as a whole when the hunting and permitting system as its set up now is so easily taken advantage of. It wouldn't be the first to ban trophy hunts; Kenya has banned hunting since 1977, and Botswana and Zambia recently announced plans to limit or eliminate trophy hunting of a variety of threatened species. That lack of horn identification has been a driving force behind tech developments like those of the Rhino Rescue Project, which has designed a comprehensive identification system for horns. First, an x-ray visible dye is injected into the horn of a living rhino, and a trio of ID microchips are inserted into the horn as well as the living animal, and keyed to a DNA sample in a database. The dye is designed to make scanning for horns easier for customs officials, while the ID chips can help pinpoint exactly where a horn came from and what individual animal was poached. Rhino Rescue Project is testing their system now, and expects that one deployed in the field could remain operational for three to four years. Theres another option, often trumpeted by owners of private rhino reserves in South Africa: Legalize and regulate the trade. One particularly vocal proponent is rhino breeder John Hume, who has nearly 800 individuals on his ranches. Unlike elephant ivory, rhino horn grows back, and thus can be harvested without killing the animal. (While a rhino might get grumpy at losing its fancy horn, they dont have blood vessels or nerves.) Hume has millions of dollars worth of horn harvested from his animals already stockpiled in banks around South Africa, and as such obviously stands to profit from legalization. But the concept does have merit, at least at first glance: Why kill rhinos for horn when you can just clip it off? There's another potential bonus: Opening up a flow of legal goods could help deflate the price bubble, which would discourage criminals from getting involved in the trade. "With legalized trade will come increased incentives for rhino breeding operations," Hume said in a lengthy discussion of his proposed plans with Safari Talk. "We have a vast amount of land available throughout rhino range states. The day we reach a point where demand outstrips supply will be the day that the rhino will be doomed anyway. With the status quo and current poaching levels, that day is approaching very fast for rhinos." Conservationists and activists have a straightforward counter: Poaching an animal is a hell of a lot cheaper and easier than farming them. And because horn has been illegal for so long, the

trade is already dominated by criminals, not ranchers, and its unlikely legalizing horn is going to convince crime bosses in Asia to drop poaching and set up rhino farms in Africa, especially when the trade in its current form is still a relatively low-risk enterprise. In any case, without any sort of standardized licensing system, it would be impossible to sort out which horns were legally harvested or not, which would make smuggling illegal horn even easier than it already is. As it stands, legalization could be a long-term solution, but in the current environment it would only make cracking down on poaching and crime rings even more difficult. Perhaps if horns themselves were more securely permitted and identified, if rangers were better equipped to crack down on poaching, and if the rampant corruption that allows the Asian side of the trade to go on were eliminated, then a legal rhino trade could flourish. But as it stands, the criminal elements running the trade aren't going to give up poaching and smuggling to set up rhino farms. Whether its legal or not, the most fundamental problem with the rhino horn tradealong with much of the trade in illicit wildlife partsis that its entire demand is based on one hundred percent pure, unadulterated bullshit. It cant be repeated enough: Rhino horn is made of an inert biological compound that has zero medicinal or psychoactive effects. Zero.

The mind-meltingly insane truth is that the slaughter of thousands of rhinos is fueled by a giant lie.
That means that people are spending $30,000+ a pound to do what amounts to cutting up lines of fingernails, or having someone treat cancer by eating hair. That people are spending so much on horn as medicine is depressing enough in its own right, partly because many users are desperate people whove been misled. But its nearly impossible to overstate the stupidity of pretending that rhino horn is a party drug or hangover cure. It makes the VIP bottle service crowd dropping tens of thousands of dollars a night on "ultra-premium liquor marked up 1,000 percent by clubs seem rather practical in comparison. Cracking down on poaching, smuggling, and corruption is an incredibly important part of limiting the species-threatening effects of the trade. Yet the mind-meltingly insane truth is that all of these efforts, the slaughter of thousands of rhinos (along with tiger farming, bear bile extraction, and so on), and a massive revenue stream for organized crime is all fueled by a giant lie. Rhino horn has become more valuable than gold despite the fact that it has literally no useful properties. That people worldwide believe otherwise is absurd. If the trade is to be truly stopped, people need to learn that horn doesnt cure cancer, it doesnt make you party harder, and its certainly not bling. We need to see some really radical responses from law enforcement that really put in place some very serious penalties as deterrents, and people need to be campaigning to make the people that do this look foolish, Allan said. They need to learn that theyre being conned, and theyre going to have to wise up.

Killing the trade from a purely enforcement angle is impossible, partly because of the sheer size of the trade, and partly because its reactionary. Arresting a guy with a horn doesnt bring a dead rhino back to life, and if the rhino population declines, thats a crucial distinction. Awareness thus needs to take the forefront, especially when it comes to demand. South African citizens have becoming increasingly vocal about protecting their ecological heritage, as have many citizens affected by the trade. (Kenyans, for example, have picked up their own guns to assist rangers in protecting elephants.) South Africa's rhinos were even named the country's top newsmaker by the National Press Club, a decision that was met with controversy. Building popular support against the trade has been more difficult on the demand side. People need to learn that objectively, horn is worthless, unless youre the rhino thats been killed for it. If demand isnt curbed, the alternative is an economy whose bubble keeps swelling, fueled most worryingly by the obscenely rich along with speculators looking to hoard horn in case rhinos go extinct, which will send the price of horn soaring beyond even the ridiculous heights its hit now. If the growth of the rhino horn market continues at its current pace, extinction does become a valid concern. However, the alternative is equally plausible. Black rhinos face the biggest risk of extinction, but their population growth in recent years offers hope that they could rebound if the pressures of poaching are mitigated. And while South Africas white rhinos are firmly in the crosshairs of the trade, theyve also received a large amount of popular attention in the past few years, which more recently has been converted into action. For all the convoluted parts of the trade, thats whats most important, as the only way to completely end the trade is to convince people that trick cures and fake highs arent worth throwing away the worlds wildlife.

The Incredible Scale of Wildlife and Forest Crime Explained in Just Two Minutes
Wildlife trafficking and forest crime is worth at least $17 billion a year worldwide, which makes it such a big industry that it's impossible to encapsulate its breadth in one or a dozen posts. But the above video from the EIA and Traffic/WWF does a great job of distilling the breadth of wildlife and forest crime down into two minutes. If you want it summed up even further, try this: In every corner of the world, people are poaching, stealing, selling and buying protected species. While I'm not normally a fan of text-heavy videos, in this case it works because the figures are simply astounding. Rhino poaching in South Africa has increased 50-fold in the last five years. 30 percent of the world's timber comes from illegal sources. More than 5,400 endangered Asian big cats have been poached since 2000. And in many of those cases, the millions and billions made are being funneled into the pockets of criminals, corrupt officials, and militants. It's fairly overwhelming, so what can you do? Supporting the above

organizations is a start, but more than that, the trade won't go away until more people are made aware of how destructive it is. Spread the word, folks.

The Softer Side of the Darknet

A few years ago Gawker published a revealing report on Silk Road, a website on the Tor network that we've all come to know and love, which they claimed was nothing more than a hive for scum, villainy, and of course lots of counterfeit money, drugs, weapons, and other things that make our religious idols weep. It wasn't long before bloggers and reporters were screaming bloody murder because they had ordered and received two grams of decent quality Afghan hashish in their snail mail. Those brave souls who clicked some more and Googled some Tor addresses also bumped into websites of people claiming to be contract killers ("Solutions to common problems! No fish too big, no job too small!"), a bunch of Rule 34-affirming terrible porn (welcome to the ZooNecro-chan!) and of course a reasonably safe haven for kiddy fiddlers. Since then the Tor network has of course also been in the news for its great role in the workings of Wikileaks, Anonymous, and even the enabling power its anonymity brought rebels in the Arab Spring. But all this paints a picture that I feel is a little bit unfair. Even on the Tor network, not everything is hard-edged crime, drug deals, and cyber fugitives. Even there, hidden amongst the piles of shit, war, and filth of the human kind (I really didn't need to know the kiddy porn wiki has a category named 'hurtcore'), under the mud of human mental and social excrement lie gems of fluffy adorableness waiting to shine their light into the darkest corners of the darknet. Yes, even here the human desire for creativity and expression manifests itself! Therefore I present to you: some of the softer sides of the darknet. Consider, for example, Silk Road merchant ChristineBeckley11. Self-described as a laid-back student trying to scrape some bitcoins together (at the time of writing, bitcoin probably wasn't the cut-throat bubble business it is now) so she can buy some magic mushrooms. And what services might she offer? Does she sell her urine to fetishists? Extreme camgirl shows? Lord no. For 0.55 she'll send you a beautiful, touching custom-made poem within 48 hours. Her only review even praises its artistic merit. ChristineBeckley11's assortment also offers fortune cookies (0.06) which, as it would seem, are pretty popular among folks who usually buy party packs of angel dust. A merchant named BodyInAction sells everything the average Lance Armstrong could wish for, from growth hormones to EPO, all of course for the higher goal of self-improvement. The fact that BodyInAction's ethical standards differ from the average lifestyle consultant

doesn't stop him from offering quality olive oil. After all, even the beefcake lifter lifestyle deserves the joys of a proper and tasteful frying pan lubricant. Considering anarchists and dealers on the internet aren't commonly known for their excellent grammar and writing, we turn to merchant Apluspapers. In true Breaking Bad style, this English-teacher-gone-wrong offers his services as a ghostwriter for all your ads, as well as for university essays and theses up to the MA level (lazy college seniors, turn your ears). You see, it's not only murderers, but also plagiarists that can profit from the anonymous internet. Which terminal disease has driven this seemingly soft-hearted man to such desperate acts of crime remains shrouded in mystery. KJohn is a weathered seller of acid and medical marijuana, which also seems to have brought him closely in touch with the zeitgeist of this eon. His connectedness is expressed to the unsuspecting drug-shopping junk in prose from his own keyboard about the cosmic dawn of enlightenment which awaits us in the year 2013.

KJohn most likely never paid much attention to Notorious B.I.G.'s Ten Crack Commandments, of which number four tells us to "never get high on your own supply." Alas, these warming words of hope and spiritual development are no doubt more encouraging to the average Silk Road buyer than the nihilistic ideas of a Hungarian spambot programmer. Meanwhile, elsewhere on the Tor network someone started the website Bittit, a place where one can sell photos for bitcoins, or simply post them hoping for a donation. Why not use regular photo sharing services? Is this Flickr for those who are convinced Flickr is a system of capitalist oppression they need to escape from? Possibly it's a special kind of exhibitionist who'll only upload their photos to a website hidden at a seemingly random 16 digit URL. Or maybe they're all just crypto warriors who've grown so accustomed to the darknet that they just don't know better than obscure sites like these. Perhaps the uploaded photos can offer us a glimpse into their lives.

Among some rather nice landscape photography and cheesy pics of plush weed toys on someone's couch, we find the gents in the bottom right corner. The uploader notes that "it was one of those kinds of parties." That is was. The party lifestyle of the darknet is an epic one, and appears to include sweet homemade costumes of your favorite sci-fi characters. By the way, the magnificent "crayfish shaking hands with Yoda while Dwayne Johnson looks on from wall" on the top left easily tops a lot of work seen at yearly art school final exams.

Thanks to the continuous support of the US Naval Research Laboratory, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and many NGOs, the Tor network can survive to support countries

where freedom of press is not a given, or where panoptic censorship severely limits the freedom of speech online. But on a smaller (and cuter) scale we also find rebels who fight the evil powers of oppressors. After a cease and desist by Hasbro Inc. in 2011 took down the famous My Little Pony repository ponyarchive.eu, where once one could view and enjoy all episodes of the animation series My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, it wasn't long before in the dark recesses of the Tor network the alter ego YayPonies was born, still offering the same message of peace, friendship and ponies.

A cease and desist order concerning My Little Pony is pure internet poetry in itself, so to conclude this selection of wonder, a few words from that text: I for one sleep more peacefully knowing that bitter internet criminals have a considerably increased chance of becoming peace-loving bronies thanks to the freedom fighters of YayPonies. Bach, Einstein, Darwin, Rachmaninoff, John Adams, they all got down with their cousins. Big deal. Of course there are naysaying genetic experts, like Joan Scott, a counselor who once explained to NPR, the biological complications that can arise from inbreeding. But for most, those worries pale in comparison to shame of society and the criminal consequences that canoodling cousins can face.

The Nation's Top Climate Scientist Predicts an "IceFree, Human-Free" Planet

"Burning all fossil fuels could result in the planet being not only ice-free but human-free." That's a direct quote from our nation's top climate scientist, Dr. James Hansen. The good doctor, and longtime head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, just quit his day job, apparently so that he could spend more time making apocalyptic pronouncements. Unfortunately, nobody's more qualified to make such predictions than Dr. Hansen. As the veritable founder of American climate science, he was the first to effectively recognize and sound the alarm regarding the threat of an excess accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. In recent years, Hansen has spent an increasingly large chunk of his time working to raise public awareness about climate changewriting books, getting arrested protesting at the White House, doing talking head spots on cable, all while continuing to research the nature of the beast he was facing down. Since he began his activism, that many-tentacled beast has

only grown more ornery. Worldwide emissions haven't slowed a single puff of carbon-filled smoke. The Arctic is melting, and so is Antarctica. Temps are rising faster than predicted. And that's the subject of a white paper Hansen published last night, which aims to clear up some of the questions he's received in the wake of his departure. The biggest chunk of it focuses on "The Venus Syndrome"the question of whether global warming might ever get so bad that our climate resembles that of the totally inhospitable second planet from the sun. His answer is: well, almost. Hansen explains that "if we burn all the fossil fuels it is certain that sea level would eventually rise by tens of meters. The only argument is how soon the rise of several meters needed to destroy habitability of all coastal cities would occur. It is also possible that burning all fossil fuels would eventually set off a hyperthermal event, a mini-runaway." By mini-runaway, he means an event fed by feedback loops like melting permafrost or, as happened during the Paleocene, the mass melting methane hydrates (yeah, that's the stuff Japan is currently trying to mine). See, as ocean and air temps rise, more methane-rich stuff like permafrost and hydrates melt. Methane traps more heat than carbon, and speeds the warming. This amplification effect means drastic warming can be triggered much faster than current models predict. But could it ever get as nasty as Venus? Hansen says yes, theoretically. "Earth can 'achieve' Venus-like conditions, in the sense of ~90 bar surface pressure, only after first getting rid of its ocean via escape of hydrogen to space," he writes. "This is conceivable if the atmosphere warms enough that the troposphere expands into the present stratosphere." Hansen goes deeper into the science, dive into the paper here. But his conclusions should be read by everyone, so I'll quote him at length: The picture that emerges for Earth sometime in the distant future, if we should dig up and burn every fossil fuel, is ... an ice-free Antarctica and a desolate planet without human inhabitants. Although temperatures in the Himalayas may have become seductive, it is doubtful that the many would allow the wealthy few to appropriate 6 this territory to themselves or that humans would survive with the extermination of most other species on the planet. ... But it is not an exaggeration to suggest, based on best available scientific evidence, that burning all fossil fuels could result in the planet being not only ice-free but humanfree. Bear in mind, these are the words of a scientist, not a preacher going on about the rapture. This is how the nation's top climate scientist imagines the future: a desolate, sweltering wasteland where the rich, ensconced in their Himalayan fortresses, battle to keep the barbarians at the gate. Againthat's a vision sprouting from the prognosis of science, not apocalyptic sci-fi. If we want to be sure to prevent it from playing out, maybe we'd better keep some carbon in the ground, just to be safe.

The Next 5 Billion: What Do You Think?

In the coming decades, five billion people -- the majority of humanity -- will come online for the first time, mostly in parts of the world ridden with conflict, instability and repression. We've spent much of the last year traveling to those parts of the world to witness the new digital age firsthand. And we've seen many things:

In Tunisia, we met with former revolutionaries. After ousting longtime dictator Ben Ali, they decided to channel their energy toward becoming Android developers. In Afghanistan, we learned of an entire village that revolted against the Taliban when the extremist group tried to seize their phones. In Kenya, we've seen Maasai nomads without home electricity or running water nonetheless pay for items with their mobile devices. In North Korea, citizens risk their lives and harsh punishment in order to obtain smuggled phones and tablets and take an even greater risk to venture close to the Chinese border so they can capture a signal. In Ciudad Juarez in Mexico, we saw that while police hide their identities with masks, citizens are sometimes willing to take out their mobile phones and share warnings on social media. In Iraq, following the return of looted artifacts, we were able to put the entire museum online so the world could experience the country's rich history. In Chad -- the poorest country on earth with less than 1 percent of the population able to access electricity -- we met activists who were using the Internet to add a layer of transparency to the oil and gas sector. In Myanmar, a country that until 18 months ago had been under military dictatorship for half a century, we met a transitional government using Gmail as its email service and even found a former Google employee who had returned home to do a Burmese startup. In Pakistan, we met a group of women who were attacked by the Taliban with acid. Their physical scars carry an unfair stigma that makes it hard for them to find work, but the Internet allows them to run businesses and interact with the world despite these challenges. In Israel, one of the only things that the Israelis and the Palestinians seemed to agree on was that they love using the Internet.

The list goes on. The world is not perfect, and with more connectivity we have greater visibility into the challenges that exist in every corner of the globe. There's room for optimism and there's room for pessimism, but above all we must start with understanding. So we're publishing a book, The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business. It looks at the good and the bad that awaits us, and describes some ways we might navigate these

challenges. As you think about the next five billion to come online, what makes you excited and afraid? What stories do you have of surprising twists on the front lines of this new digital age? Leave a comment; on Monday, April 29 we're giving signed copies of our book to the 15 most insightful comments chosen by The Huffington Post, and we'd love to hear from you!

Reducing Black Carbon and Other Short-Lived Climate Pollutants Could Reduce Sea Level Rise by a Third
Recently we learned that nearly 3.5 million people are killed each year by indoor air pollution, much of it caused by black carbon soot. It's a health problem for sure, and it's a climate change problem, both of significant sizedespite the general lack of media attention focused on either aspect. Now, a well-timed report coming out of the National Center for Atmospheric Research really shows the very powerful effect that reducing black carbon (that purple haze in the image above), as well as other short-lived air pollutants, can significantly slow sea level rise. The pollutants: methane, tropospheric ozone, hydrofluorocarbons, and black carbon. Compared to carbon dioxide all of these pollutants come out of the air quickly particularly black carbonlasting anywhere from a few weeks in the atmosphere to a couple decades, versus the centuries CO2 can last. So reducing the emissions of all these can have a much more rapid effect than can cutting CO2though reducing that is still critical as it's the dominant greenhouse gas which humans have any control over. How much can cutting these pollutants reduce warming and slow our rising seas? The scientists found that by cutting back on all these pollutants can temporarily slow sea level rise by about 25 to 50 percent, due to slowing temperature rise. By 2100, if we cut back on these pollutants, as well as reduce carbon dioxide emissions, sea level rise over the coming century can be reduced by at least 30 percent. Previous research looking just at the effect that reducing black carbon pollution found that Arctic warming could be cut two-thirds by 2030 by doing so, with a decrease in warming of 0.5C. But we have to act quickly: To slow sea level rise that much, we have to essentially start cutting down on these pollutants right now. Delaying action until 2040 reduces the potential for reducing sea level rise by one-third.

What does that mean for coastal cities? We're not talking about sea levels being three feet higher than todayto use a pretty middle-of-the-road estimaterather just about two feet, or potentially less. Something some of the world's most populous cities would still have to take very seriously, but it would give them more time to prepare.

Where's this pollution coming from?

Black carbon pollution comes from a couple of main sources: Older cooking stoves burning wood, dried dung, some other form of biomass; older diesel engines. There have been ongoing efforts to replace these older cookstoves with similar newer models that both use less fuel and reduce emissions, but they have yet to show clear resultsold habits and preferences are hard to break. Methane, again, comes from a variety of sources: leaks in natural gas production are an easily remedied source; as is capturing it from landfills. Less easy, at least technologically, is reducing methane associated with livestock agriculturethough reducing the amount of meat and dairy we eat is a good start. Stopping methane from permafrost melting and seeping up from the ocean floor, both caused by global warming, is much more problematic to stop. Tropospheric ozone--which is different in location that the ozone that's responsible for all sorts of health problems, as well the ozone layer higher up in the atmosphere that we want to keep intact--comes the reaction of nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, and volatile organic compounds in the presence of sunlight. Reducing tailpipe emissions from motor vehicles, reducing industrial emissions, as well as chemical solvents can help here. Hydrofluorocarbons, used to replace the ozone layer-depleting CFCs, have a seriously high warming potential, even compared to methane. Unfortunately demand for them is expected to increase in the coming decades as more of the world decides, like the United States has, that using air conditioning is the best thing since indoor plumbing. HFCs also come from a variety of industrial processes. It's worth noting that previous research by the EPA has shown that phasing out HFCs altogether could slow global warming by a decade.

Air Pollution Kills More People Than AIDS and Malaria Combined
Last week the World Health Organization came out with a study, published in The Lancet, that comes to the sobering conclusion that air pollution kills more people around the world every year than are killed by AIDS and malaria, combined. Where's the outrage? Looking at stats from 2010, the report found that 3.5 million deaths a year are caused by indoor air pollution, with 3.3 million dead from outdoor air pollution. The total amount is less

than the sum of the two figures, the report notes, as there are probably half a million deaths that have been caused by a combination of both factors. No matter the exact total, better measurements mean we have a significant increase from previous figures for air pollution deaths, which last tallied 3.2 million deaths from air pollution from both sources combined. For comparison, WHO stats for 2010 show that malaria caused an estimated 655,000 deaths, out of roughly 220 million people getting the illness; AIDS took the lives of an estimated 1.8 million people in the same year. In other words, just indoor air pollution (mostly caused by wood fires and stoves) or outdoor air pollution alone, each cause more deaths each year than two of the world's most high profile, and most combated, diseases. How to cut down on these deaths? It obviously comes down to reducing the source of pollution, but that's easier said than done. In the case of indoor air pollution, that means replacing older cookstoves that burn wood, dried dung, or some other form of biomass, with newer, more efficient models that both reduce the amount of material burned in them and reduce pollution. This is of course assuming that electric or gas-fired ovens and cooktops are off the tablewhich is often the case for those people most-affected by indoor air pollution, although initiatives like those pushed by India's solar grandmas are helping bring cleaner cooking to the developing world. Efforts have been underway for several years to do this, with many attempts to design more efficient replacements. While Hillary Clinton helmed the State Department, a good deal of effort and money was thrown at the problem, to just name one international effort. Unfortunately swapping out cook stoves is sometimes hampered by habit. One study looked at efforts to do so in Bangladesh. It found that women therewhich are disproportionately affected by indoor air pollutionwere reluctant to change, preferring to adjust other aspects of their lives to improve the welfare of their families, far before decreasing their exposure to the black soot created by dirty cook stoves. Replacing these older cook stoves would also have a significant benefit for reducing climate change as well. Though much lower profile than greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane, black soot pollution is a large component in increasing global warming. Numerous studies have shown that significant gains in reducing warming could be quickly realized by reducing black soot pollution. Furthermore, reducing black soot could help slow the melting of glaciers, particularly in the Himalayas, where the soot falls on ice, changes the reflectivity and increases melting. In the case of outdoor air pollution, WHO's Maria Neira told Reuters that increasing access to clean energy is key.

At least 7 million people die from air pollution each year. Why isn't air pollution more of a concern?
"If we increase access to clean energy, the health benefits will be enormous. Maybe the health argument was not used enough," in touting the benefits of low-carbon energy sources versus fossil fuels, Neira said. I keep sitting with the stats. Even accounting for overlaps in causes of death, at least 7 million people die from air pollution each year. Compared to that, as devastating as any death is, regardless of source, the number of dead from malaria and AIDS just pale in comparison even compared to 2004, the peak year for AIDS deaths. Why isn't air pollution more of a concern? I wonder if some of it is related to why there's been a similar level of apparent apathy among the public at largethose not affected, or believe themselves not to be soabout climate change. Combating malaria and AIDS have a more concrete focal point: Stop the transmission of both diseases; develop either better medicines to treat or vaccinate against the disease, in the case of malaria, or provide a cure, in the case of AIDS. We know how to do these things, even if we're not always successful. But are there too many moving pieces in preventing air pollution to elicit the same level of passion? Clearly it does create passion in some people, as it does with climate change. But I wonder if because air pollution is a slow motion killer (dramatic incidents aside like recent air pollution spikes in China, or, half a century ago, in London's Great Smog), with the steps that individuals can take protect themselves not always within their control, that it's more difficult to get worked up about.

The Atmosphere Now Holds 14 Percent More Carbon Than Science Says Is Safe for Human Civilization

Here are a few numbers that should change the way that we think about how humans live on planet Earth: 400, 3,000,000, and 7. And here is what they mean: The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is on the brink of being 400 parts per millionthe leading tracker of atmospheric carbon levels, at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, has already taken a few 400 ppm readings, and it is just a matter of time before the new record level is confirmed. (If you are curious to see this modern-day doomsday clock tick onwards, in real-time the Scripps Institute of Oceanography has a website it updates daily.)

The last time that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was that high was 3,000,000 years ago. It was the Plioscene era, and things were a little bit more volatile back then. For one thing, sea levels were up to 40 meters higher in places, and the world was, on average, 5-7 degrees warmer, Fahrenheit. Yep, 7 degrees warmer. That is the difference between 32 F and 39 F. 83 F and 90 F. That is enough to radically disrupt ecosystems across the planet, and also whether or not you can bear doing manual labor outdoors on a given day. Human beings have flourishedwe learned how to farm, how to domesticate animals, how to build gadgets to do that stuff better, and ultimately, how to organize permanent communities with tall buildings and waste disposal and transportation networkslargely while carbon dioxide levels were at the pre-industrial levels of 280 parts per million. Scientists tell us that 350 parts per million is the "safe" level of carbon to keep in the atmosphere, "safe" being a euphemism for "we really have no idea what might happen to civilization as we know it if we blow too far past this." That's why 350.org, the nation's leading climate activist group, is named after the number We have now officially blown way past it. 400 ppm is a whole 'nother ball game. A whole new level of uncertainty. There is now 14.3% more carbon in the atmosphere than scientists say is safe to maintain a stable civilization. ''I wish it weren't true but it looks like the world is going to blow through the 400 ppm level without losing a beat,'' Ralph Keeling, a geologist with the Scripps told the Sydney Morning Herald. ''At this pace we'll hit 450 ppm within a few decades.'' Which, whoops. Humans have never lived on a planet with so much heat-trapping carbon stuffed into the atmosphere. As the Herald notes, The 450 ppm level is considered to be the point at which the world has a 50 per cent chance of avoiding dangerous climate change. Any higher and the odds of avoiding searing temperature rises of 4 or 5 degrees by the end of the century become prohibitively risky. Now, humans are pretty crafty, I admit, but are they crafty enough to stave off 50 meters of sea level rise? To re-organize societies in an orderly fashion as hundreds of millions of refugees pour in from now-inhospitable locales? Grow the same amount of food with far less arable land? Maybe. I guess we'll see! Because there's no indication whatsoever that we're slowing the flood of CO2 spewed forth from our factories, our coal plants, our internal combustion engines into the atmosphere. Things are about to get interesting.
We're at the point now where we've done the same, just laid ourselves a nice thick layer of heat-trapping material over our planet, and the Earth is just starting to feel it. But what we're currently experiencing isn't necessarily the full effect of what we've already set in motion, and we haven't even bothered to slow down the rate at which we add more layers on that blanket.

The World's Fastest-Growing Cause of Death Is Pollution from Car Exhaust

Cars, once again, are killing us. They're killing us in crashes and accidents, yes, and they're encouraging us to grow obese and then killing us a little more slowly. But, more than ever before, they're killing us with their pollution. Particulate air pollution, along with obesity, are now the two fastest-growing causes of death in the world, according to a new study published in the Lancet. The study found that in 2010, 3.2 million people died prematurely from the air pollution particularly the sooty kind that spews from the exhaust pipes of cars and trucks. And of those untimely deaths, 2.1 most were in Asia, where a boom in car use has choked the streets of India and China's fast-expanding cities with smog. The Guardian reports that "In 2010, more than 2.1m people in Asia died prematurely from air pollution, mostly from the minute particles of diesel soot
and gasses emitted from cars and lorries ... Worldwide, a record 3.2m people a year died from air pollution in 2010, compared with 800,000 in 2000. It now ranks for the first time in the world's top 10 list of killer diseases, says the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) study."

And the cars are going to keep piling up, too. Car ownership continues to skyrocket, as this handy little terrifying chart demonstrates. There are now 114 million cars in China alone (which is still nothing compared to the U.S.) and the number grows between 4-8% every quarter. The cars used in China and India aren't subject to the same air quality restrictions they are in Europe and the U.S. And they're pouring into already gridlocked cities like Beijing and Dehli, where millions of them will sit idle in worsening traffic jams for hours on end, spewing exhaust emissions into nearby communities. And the death toll will continue to rise, so as long as those economic powerhouses choose to turn to the automobile as their go-to future for transportation, to embrace them as status symbols, as aspirational freedom mobiles as Americans did. Doing so of course will have further consequences down the road, after car ownership spurs sprawling, unsustainable development, but that's a topic for another day. For now, suffice to say that the specter of death-by-air-pollution is rising, and it's being driven, pun-style, by a quest for suburbia and the middle class lifestyle of yester-century. There's plenty of alternative transit tech, plenty of urban planning options available already subways, light rail, smart growth, etc If China and India's governments hope to keep their citizens from dying off early, they'll start moving to tame the car now. Americans, of course, should follow suit.

Air Pollution Is Hardening Your Arteries

That air pollution kills over 7 million people each year, more than AIDS and malaria combined, and that car exhaust is one of the fastest growing causes of death, are both pretty abstract, right? How about this latest bit of info on the harm caused by air pollution to make things more personal: New research in PLoS Medicine shows that air pollution can speed up the hardening of your arteries, leading to more heart attacks and strokes. The study, conducted by professors from the University of Michigan and the University of Washington, found that higher concentrations of fine particulate air pollution (PM2.5) are linked with faster thickening of the inner layers of the carotid artery. Reducing this pollution slowed the thickening of these layers. Looking at over 5000 people between the ages of 45 and 84 from six US cities, and adjusting for other factors that could contribute to hardening of the arteries, they found that "people living in a more polluted part of town may have a 2% higher risk of stroke as compared to people in a less polluted part of the same metropolitan area." To put this in perspective: This study looked at people living in Baltimore, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, St Paul, and Winston Salem. The highest concentrations per cubic meter of PM2.5 pollution were in LA, at 23. The lowest were in St Paul, at 11.9, with the rest of the cities in the mid-15s range. Anything over 25 is generally considered to be unhealthy air quality. So all these cities, including smoggy LA, are under that threshold. Yetl the risk of heart attack and stroke increasednot a huge amount, but a significant one. Compare this to what we've seen in China so far this year. Back in January air pollution in Beijing was so bad it went off the top of the US chart, which stops at 500 parts per cubic meter. In the first two weeks of January concentrations of PM2.5 pollution were regularly above 700, topping out at 88637 times worse than the air pollution in Los Angeles, as measured in this study, and 54 times worse than the average air pollution for all the cities considered. In the light of what this study shows for US cities, you have to wonder just how much worse this is for the cities of Chinawhere 16 of the 20 worst-polluted cities in the world are. It also makes me wonder if 8,500 premature deaths caused by air pollution in China, as determined by a Peking University study, might not be underestimating things a bit. Not to mention the effect of air pollution in places where air pollution is even worse than China: Like Ahvaz, Iran and Kabwe, Zambia. Oh, and in case you forgot, or never knew in the first place: Air pollution has also been linked to brain damage, memory loss, and Alzheimer's disease. Or to give you another, more recent example, consider the complex chemistry and biology of plants. It sounds like a dust-dry topic but I love being able to demonstrate that it's wholly fascinating. So stories about plants run like a theme through my Wired blog: the chemical reasons that chocolate is poisonous to dogs, the way that rice plants have an affinity for arsenic, for instance. Or the surprising way that grass plain old grass in a Texas field can in conditions of stress, actually generate hydrogen cyanide and kill cattle.

The grass story reminds me of a point that the 19th century psychologist-philosopher William James liked to make. What science shows us, time and time again, is that the real world is a fantastical, wonderful, impossibly complicated piece of work and "nature is everywhere gothic". When I'm aiming high, I like the idea of being a kind of "gothic science writer" in the best Jamesian sense!

3,000 Years of Abusing Earth on a Global Scale

A new perspective emanating from archaeology and ecology suggests that humanity has spent thousands of years making widespread and profound changes to the "natural" world
Wherever you go on this blue, green and white globe of ours, odds are some person has been there before youand left a mark. That's because the hunting, farming or burning practices of our most distant ancestors have shaped most land areas on the planet, argues an interdisciplinary team of archaeologists and ecologists in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. If we are indeed living in the Anthropocenea new geologic epoch brought on by the outsized environmental effects of the human speciesthen this new interval isn't just a few hundred years old, it is older than the industrial revolution. The researchers set out to investigate just how long human being have been profoundly changing the environment on land. "This is a super important question for the identity of humanity," argues ecologist Erle Ellis of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, a co-author. "Are we the people who transformed the planet for hundreds of generations, or the people who just recently started destroying things?" To answer that outstanding question the researchers started with a vast spread of archaeological and ecological data from around the world, particularly micro charcoal records from sediment cores. The charcoal delivers a long-term record of human burning, whether intentional or accidental, that coincides with the arrival of modern humans in a particular area. That arrival also often coincides with the extinction of large predators and large animals, generally. But how exactly do humans impact a new environment? Scientists have used computer models that aim to estimate how quickly and how profoundly Homo sapiens change the landscape. One option estimates land use simply based on the number of humans around, assuming a minimum acreage required to support a person. The other model has humans relatively quickly sprawl through an entire area, but then contract to intensify land use in support of a larger but denser population. This might be dubbed the laziness principlehumans invest the least amount of work, technology or any other resource as possible to survive and even thrive, these researchers argue. "People are doing the easiest thing, knocking out top predators early on," Ellis explains. "There's a pretty big impact per person to make a living, [because people are] burning big swathes of

forest just to make it easier to get some game." According to this model, and the charcoal record where it is available, a relatively small number of humans began to transform most of the planet's land surface at least 3,000 years ago. "If people can get away with less work, they're going to do less work," says archaeologist Dorian Fuller of University College London, who also contributed to the research. Take for example rice cultivation in Asia, developed some 6,000 years ago in the Yangtze River Valley but not adopted for another thousand years or so in areas of southern China and Southeast Asia. "You have relatively happy huntergatherer-fishers who don't want to put in the effort" to farm rice until population density requires it, Fuller explains. As the human population swellsas seen in the record of fertilizer use in Europe and Asiathe resources then become more intensively used. This is not confined to agriculture; archaeologists find a similar intensification in the hunting patterns of Paleolithic Europeans after the decline of big game. These proto-Europeans began to hunt a wider range of smaller animals more intensively as well as developing the food preparation technology to extract more food from a larger array of sources. This idea further suggests that humanity has escaped time and time again from the Malthusian trap of population colliding with limited resources by transforming the relationship between human population and the environment through technology, whether through the invention of cooking or modern mechanized agriculture. Humanity simply applies technology to derive more from a given resource, whether it be copper or farmland. That trend continues into the present day, the researchers argue. The most modern industrial agriculture focuses primarily on the best land it can get. The human population has shifted away from subsistence and low productivity agriculture, collecting in cities as fossil-fueled machines help fewer farmers work the land. "The next revolution is when the majority of people get into cities and are fed by a minority," Fuller explains. This process is already complete in industrialized countries where less than 1 percent of the population feeds the rest, but "we're not finished with that yet," in developing countries such as China and India, Fuller says. Peak farmland may be imminent. If the human impact is longstanding and widespread, then the landscape is as much in recovery from past impacts as it is enduring new changes. Think of the cutting back of the Amazon rainforestitself potentially a recovery from earlier, more intensive human use before the arrival of Europeansversus the regrowth of the forests of the eastern U.S. In fact, the woodland ecosystems of Europe and South America commonly thought of as natural may be the legacy of prior human use. "Most of the forest have had people in them, interacting with them and transplanting species around for thousands of years," Fuller notes. "We have very little in the way of natural forests, which doesn't mean that we shouldn't be trying to reforest environments and have forests." After all, the modern phase of

the Anthropocene may be the first time humans can choose intentionally what an appropriate level of impact might be. Fully answering this question of how long the human impact on land has been widespread requires a broader global synthesis of the archaeological and paleoecological data on human population and land use. Most of that data is availableand has been examinedin a local rather than global context, such as the impacts of humans on the Yucatan Peninsula or Australia. Nevertheless, what data exists suggests that this is a "used planet," in the words of the authors. "We've been husbanding these biomes and creating our own types of ecologies the cultivated lands, the rangelandswe've been doing this for a very long time," Ellis argues. "We've been living in that Anthropocene biosphere since prehistory."

Not overly surprising to me, but then I'm pretty cynical. Whenever I would see articles about large fauna extinctions after the arrival of people that would then say, "based on their model people weren't the reason", it would make me wonder. Usually they would say there were too few people to have that much impact. I think the problem is these are typically people who learned about farming, hunting, living off the land by reading about it and lack a certain amount of insight. Humans in small groups can accomplish an amazing amount of destruction and change in an environment in trying to survive. I saw an article trying to work out how much energy it would take for a group of people to kill a mammoth. They argued it was too difficult to be worth it, and the environment changing was more likely the cause of extinction. That assumes, of course, that they tried to kill them with spears or digging huge pits with spikes. More likely theres an easier way which we don't know of, and we wiped them out. People are people, the image of native people or ancient man living in harmony with nature is a nostalgic fantasy. I'm not saying people are bad, I'm just saying modern people underestimate how much we can do without modern machines and weapons.

"Are we the people who transformed the planet for hundreds of generations, or the people who just recently started destroying things?" I would say both. Yeah, we have been transforming the planet for hundreds of generations but since the Industrial Revolution we have stared destroying very important things. Before the Industrial Revolution we did not have the ability to fundamentally alter the entire worlds climate and alter the pH of the oceans. We were not causing glaciers to melt, the Arctic to become ice free in the summer, creating

dead zones in the oceans and lakes, removing mountain tops, carving vast holes in the Earth, and killing the coral reefs. "The next revolution is when the majority of people get into cities and are fed by a minority," And breath polluted air and drink polluted water. We have not had the majority of our population living in cities for very long. We have gone from one city with a population greater than 10 million in 1950 to over 20 today. Many of those cities have vast slum areas that provide very poor services. We will just have to see how that all works out. Also note that since 1800, the global population has increased from around 1 billion to more than 7 billion people. During that time (which includes most of the industrial revolution), the metric tonnes of co2 released into the atmosphere each year has increased from near zero to 9 billion. I think that population growth should correlate very well with carbon emissions. While the global population is expected to increase by 2 billion in the next 30 years before tapering off at 10 billion people, only a small fraction of the population has reaped the benefits (and induced the consequences) of industrialization - those numbers are greatly increasing in the two most populaced countries, China and India. The Tao recognized the necessary symbiotic relation of man and the earth. Point is, long thinkers from way back before the Tao spoke of needing balance though they recognized we were not the only species and that the "benefit" would be for everything living. Man likes to make it easy on itself, take shortcuts, apply "bandages" to fatal wounds and arrogantly believe its the only one that matters. Leapfrog ahead 3000 years and let us use the internet to race forward our collective intelligence and continue our Homo evolution and begin a symbiotic relation with the whole and implicate order