The human being who arguably has done more than any other to make people aware of the word "species" is Charles Darwin, whose "On the Origin of Species" helped humans conceptualize the organizing principles of evolution.

But Darwin, on his famous visit to the Galapagos Islands, missed at least one animal: The pink land iguana. Just about right now the embargo is lifting on a new study announcing that this particular reptile has now been officially discovered. The team publishing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is based at the University Tor Vergata in Rome. (Yes, the big Rome, in Italy.) It seems Darwin missed a pretty important species, judging by the summary of the study:

On his visit to the Galápagos Islands in 1835, Darwin failed to explore the Volcan Wolf volcano on the island of Isabela, the only home of the "rosada" iguana, a newly identified species of the land iguana Conolophus. Genetic analysis of the rosada and other species of land iguanas performed by Gabriele Gentile and colleagues show that the rosada iguana originated in the Galápagos more than five million years ago, and diverged from the island's other iguana populations when the archipelago was still forming. The ancient divergence between the rosada and other land iguanas--prior to the formation of the Volcan Wolf volcano--provides evidence for one of the most ancient diversification events recorded in the Galápagos.

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When last Dateline Earth checked in on our friends, the endangered gorillas of central Africa, we saw they were in grave danger of being shot in the fighting in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

But 2008 also saw the known population of gorillas double with the discovery of a previously unknown population in the Republic of the Congo. (A different country. Confusing, wot?)

Comes now news that the United Nations is calling this the Year of the Gorilla. The Daily Green has already weighed in, starting with the delicious comparison that there are more people living in Spokane than there are gorillas in the world.

We're bringing something new to the party, though: This thought-provoking piece by Alex Halperin in The American, in which he examines how well the people of Rwanda are treating gorillas, despite their poverty amid efforts to bring some sense of normalcy to the profoundly riven country. He discusses the gorilla-driven tourism, but contrasts this with the troubling poverty of the nation.

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Well, if you think Detroit has problems... you're right.

But so often nowadays we hear America's auto giants compared to Toyota, which of course cut a pretty commanding figure throughout the 70s, 80s and 90s in producing fuel-efficient cars that Americans wanted.

We hear today, though, from The Associated Press's Yuri Kageyma, that Toyota is struggling and will report its first annual loss in 70 years. A strong yen and the global economic downturn loom large.

That's all just the background, though, to the news that despite its troubles -- or perhaps because of them? -- Toyota is quietly experimenting with a solar-powered car. Kageyma reports:

Toyota is a leader in green technology, and executives have stressed that they won't cut back on environmental research despite its troubles.

Unfortunately, The AP story is a pickup from The Nikkei, a Japanese business publication written in English, and The Nikkei appears to require subscription if you want to read the story. I'll update this post if I find a free way to get the original story.

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It's a name that wouldn't mean much to anyone but environmental reporters, but it sure stuck out for us when we saw "Rapanos" on the Department of Justice news release.

That would be John A. Rapanos, the Michigan developer who tried -- with some success, his allies argue -- to rein in federal enforcement of the Clean Water Act to protect so-called "isolated wetlands."

Rapanos, you see, was accused of illegally filling 54 acres of wetlands to build homes and a shopping center. He argued that because the property in question was far from any "navigable waters" protected under the Clean Water Act, he was in the clear.

Now, let's see... the development started in 1988. Having amply warned him, the feds filed an enforcement action against him in 1994. The case went to the SCOTUS, where a majority of five justices ruled in his favor. Here's what the Pacific Legal Foundation had to say at the time of the court's 5-4 decision in 2004:

Our constitutional way of life got a boost last year from the U.S. Supreme Court when the court rejected the idea that federal officials have unlimited control over every pond, puddle and ditch in our country...

Unwilling to accept the Corps' expansive implementation of the Clean Water Act, the majority wrote that lower courts needed to look again at Rapanos' case -- with the feds' bearing the burden of showing that there is a substantial nexus between his property and a navigable waterway.

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Who says Detroit can't make a worthwhile car?
Dan Neil of the Los Angeles Times reports that on his recent test drive of the new Ford Fusion hybrid he got 52 mpg in mixed city and highway driving. This in a decent-sized sedan. Ford itself only claims 41 mpg in the city and 36 on the highway. (That 36 is not a typo, btw; that's the way hybrids work.)

Says Neil:

Wait, so, has somebody invented the car of the future and didn't tell us?

It's a worthy question. The scolding undercurrent of recent congressional hearings on the auto-industry bailout was the notion that Detroit had failed to invest in next-generation technology that could help wean us off foreign oil. Not so. What they did fail to do was sufficiently commercialize this technology so that it was ready and waiting at dealerships when people got stampeded this year by spiraling gas prices.

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I hate it when an interesting story gets buried in the crush of the holidays, which may have happened in the case of this story by my colleague Dan Richman about a Seattle dry-cleaning firm that's employing an new and supposedly eco-friendly process that uses carbon dioxide for its cleaning oomph.

Most dry cleaners are still scrubbing out the grime and stains with a powerful but cancer-promoting solvent known as percloroethylene (aka tetracholorethylene, aka perc) that has ruined underground drinking water supplies at various sites around the country.

Here in Seattle, Blue Sky cleaners recently purchased the Four Seasons dry cleaners, which had been using the perc, Richman reports.

We have to wonder, of course, what this carbon dioxide process means for global warming. The firm's Web site says the CO2 is "naturally occurring and reclaimed." It goes on:

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As President-elect Obama moved through his early choices for his new Cabinet, we heard some grumbling around Seattle because he failed to tap any Northwesterners and, said some political progressives, his picks could be summed up in a song called "Same As the Old (Democratic) Boss." Witness the pick of Carol Browner, President Clinton's EPA chief, as Obama's climate czar, for instance.

But his latest choices, on energy, climate change and marine science, foretell policies that will be quite different from the Current Occupant's.

These latest picks are:

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Apparently, if you're a deer, dead is the new green.

In Dateline Earth's never-ending quest for one hundred 1 percent solutions to global warming, we focus today on the idea of turning roadkill into energy. Yep, they're actually doing it – or at least, Michigan has passed a law allowing it.

The bill was filed by state Rep. Arlan Meekhof, who opined in a story in The Grand Rapids Press by Ted Roelofs:

I didn't know there was this mass quantity of flesh that could be helpful. We have some real opportunity to turn waste into energy.

What are they planning to do with all those deer that get nailed on Michigan highways?

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Keeping with our holiday theme here at Dateline Earth this week, I thought I would highlight some of the books that burrowed their way through snail mail to the Dateline Earth bunker this year that at least look interesting.

Most of the books I read this year had something to do with my trip to Africa (there's an actual enviro blog there, btw). The others that I'm mentioning below are on my pile still.

But one that I thoroughly enjoyed and did take time to read was one written by an old source of mine, Su Jewell, called Gators, Gourdheads and Pufflings.

Su was a biologist slaving away in the trenches in the Everglades when I first met her. She's now in D.C. While I'd never doubted her passion and dedication, I found her autobiographical book ... well, here's what I said for a cover blurb:

I laughed as I imagined the author in a wood stork suit, was intrigued as I read her tale of raising an owl at a haunted house, and shuddered at her recounting of how she had to keep alligators at bay with a 10-foot pole. It's an adventure you won't want to miss.

If you're interested, you can order it here.

Another one I can recommend from my own experience is Emerald City: An Environmental History of Seattle. Matt Klingle has done a masterful job, and it's coming out in paperback right about now.

Now, the remainder of these are the pile on my desk that I hope to get to. I can't vouch for their quality, but with authors including Newt Gingrich to investigative reporter Chris Wood, I submit they're worthy of your consideration:

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This is the time of year that a lot of Americans spend a lot of time buying a lot of stuff. So it's a good time to introduce Dateline Earth readers to this video we've been meaning to mention: The Story of Stuff.

These are 20 well-spent minutes if you'd like to know why you can't go around saying your stuff don't stink.

Frosty the coal man
is getting cleaner every day
He's affordable and adorable
and helps workers keep their pay

There must be some magic
in clean coal technology
For when they looked for pollutants
there was nearly none to see

No, we are not kidding. This was an actual spot on the Web put up by AmericasPower.org, a site of an industry group calling itself the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity.

Looks like the ad execs took their lumps on this one, because they quickly pulled the spots with this note:

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The Bush administration justified its just-announced changes in policy on the Endangered Species Act by focusing on its decision to grant "threatened" status to the polar bear, and that was the focus of much of the publicity surrounding the controversial decision. (Example: Greenpeace's press release was headlined "Greenpeace Statement on Bush Administration's Further Weakening of Protection for the Polar Bear.")

But a change that's getting less attention could have even further-reaching effects. It basically takes federal wildlife agencies out of the picture when the government is deciding whether to, say, build a bridge or a dam, or allow a mining company to dig into public land.

The new policy makes it optional to do a "Section 7 consultation" in which a government agency like the Department of Transportation or the Army Corps of Engineers -- to name two who do a fair amount of damage -- had to check in with either the National Marine Fisheries Service of the Fish and Wildlife Service, and sometimes both, before proceeding with a project.

The regulations announced yesterday -- not unexpected -- drew an immediate broadside in the form of a lawsuit filed in the Northern District of California by Greenpeace, the Center for Biological Diversity and Defenders of Wildlife. It says:

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In what might seem unlikely news, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is out with a list of its most-wanted criminals.

Yes, there are folks who do such harm to Mother Earth or their fellow humans that the acts are considered on par with robbing a bank, Dina Cappiello reports for The Associated Press:

These fugitives allegedly smuggled chemicals that eat away the Earth's protective ozone layer, dumped hazardous waste into oceans and rivers and trafficked in polluting cars. And now the government wants help in tracking them down.

Here is this EPA take-off on the FBI's most-wanted list. But like the FBI's de-emphasis on enforcement of garden-variety crimes -- bank robbery, for instance -- the EPA's move comes as the agency is doing less criminal enforcement, Cappiello notes. In the last fiscal year, for example, the agency opened 319 criminal cases, down from 425 four years earlier. Fiscal 2008 also saw the agency charge 176 criminal defendants, the fewest in the last five years.
And while Congress has authorized the agency to hire 200 criminal investigators, the roster now stands at 185.

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We've all heard about the string of lame-duck moves planned by the Bush administration that are sure to anger environmentalists interested in protecting the planet, as Dateline Earth discussed not long ago.

But now Bush is also looking for an environmental legacy, and in a Nixon-goes-to-China move, he has proposed permanently protecting an area three times the size of Texas -- bigger even than Mexico.

As incredible as that may sound, we find it even more interesting that, according to a Seattle-area environmentalist and scientist who's been pushing hard to protect the Central Pacific Islands Marine National Monument, it may not get done by the end of Bush's term because of resistance from two federal conservation agencies and the Department of Defense. The marine monument would be, says Elliott Norse, director of the Marine Conservation Biology Institute, "the biggest piece of real estate anybody has ever protected on earth." Commercial fishing would be banned in a swath of sea extending in most places to 200 miles off the shore of such bits of land as Wake Island.

But, Norse continues:

President Bush is rightly wanting to leave the best possible impression, and the folks in federal agencies, many of whom are political appointees, but also people farther down in the bowels of the of the bureaucracy, they're thinking if they do something, what kind of grief is it going to bring down on their head?

The National Marine Fisheries Service, the Department of the Interior and Defense probably all have their own reasons for looking at the proposal carefully, Norse says. Without speculating, it's hard to know why they are dragging their feet, he says.

It's possible they will keep Bush from doing anything. But there's another possibility, too, that's still unsatisfying, Norse says:

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In a new twist on the old wallet cards offered to help eco-minded consumers decide which fish to buy, Greenpeace today is updating its list of how supermarkets come out on the Earth-friendly scale. Surprisingly, perhaps, Trader Joe's ranks near the bottom of the 20 chains checked, far behind WalMart at No. 5 and Safeway at No. 6.

The wallet cards, originally from the Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch program, allow consumers to see whether the fish they're about to buy gets a green, yellow or red light from scientists who evaluate the destructiveness of fisheries.

Greenpeace's supermarket ratings, for our money, are less helpful to the consumer. But they more directly target supermarket chains to encourage them to adopt greener purchasing policies.

It's a little hard to say what we think of the Greenpeace report at this point, because we can't get the PDF to download. However, a handy chart comparing the grocery stores offers some clue to their methodology. And it isn't pretty -- none of the 20 chains surveyed came up better than about a 50% mark.

We were surprised to see Whole Foods on the top of the list, since we've visited that store and seen plenty of unsustainable fish choices being offered for sale. It's instructive to look at how Whole Foods came in first:

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