Program Note: CNN’s award-winning Planet in Peril returns this year to examine the conflict between growing populations and natural resources. Anderson Cooper, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, and Lisa Ling travel to the front lines of this worldwide battle.
Watch Planet In Peril: Battle Lines Thursday 9p ET

We devote several days on the blog to smart insight and commentary related to the special.
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Corina Monagin,
Global Viral Forecasting Initiative Program Coordinator

It was 4:30 in the morning, and I wondered how I got myself into this situation: completely soaking wet, covered in mud, fire ant bites all over my arms, and running through the depths of a Cameroon forest.

Along with my colleague Joseph (a Cameroonian ecologist), we were following a hunter from a small village in hopes of finding primate feces for collection and sampling. We woke early…very early, and while I came prepared in rubber boots, hiking pants, and an amour of various hiking accessories, our guide was in rubber flip flops and a hat that he had crafted from a banana leaf. His walking stride through the forest made me realize that my months in the gym slaving on the elliptical didn’t prepare me – I was running just to keep up.

Along with the hunter showing us his normal tracking route, Joseph was looking for feces from primates. Analyzations and discoveries in samples from the forest can tell us much about different viruses that are in the animal populations living there. They could also possibly help to predict what viruses might be prone to “jump” over to humans that come into contact with them.

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Program Note: CNN’s award-winning Planet in Peril returns this year to examine the conflict between growing populations and natural resources. Anderson Cooper, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, and Lisa Ling travel to the front lines of this worldwide battle.
Watch Planet In Peril: Battle Lines Thursday 9p ET

We devote several days on the blog to smart insight and commentary related to the special.
___________________________________________________

Editor’s Note: M. Sanjayan is a lead scientist for The Nature Conservancy, a nonprofit organization that seeks to preserve species by “protecting the land and waters they need to survive.”

M. Sanjayan
The Nature Conservancy

This Christmas, in my family, the gifts will be thoughtful but fewer. My little niece, who becomes so inundated with presents that she starts playing with the boxes they come in out of boredom, will probably receive only a manageable amount this time around. As much as I would like to take credit for this obvious decline in over-consumption, my family has not acted purely out of self-restrain. What we couldn’t bring to do the economy has done to us.

The same has been true at work. When I log on to my organization’s carbon calculator and figure out my contributions to climate change, I generally score well (that is far less of an impact than an average family) in every category except travel. With about 22 work related trips last year, many across the country, or abroad, flying take a big chunk out of any accumulated karma I receive on savings made by walking to my office, or living in a small house, or driving a hybrid – a Prius -, or even on occasion hunting (fish, ducks, deer) my own food. But next year budget cuts have forced me to cancel about one-third of my trips – eight trips less– saving my organization about 10,000 dollars on air fare and 8,000 kg of carbon dioxide.

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Program Note: CNN’s award-winning Planet in Peril returns this year to examine the conflict between growing populations and natural resources. Anderson Cooper, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, and Lisa Ling travel to the front lines of this worldwide battle.
Watch Planet In Peril: Battle Lines Thursday 9p ET

We devote several days on the blog to smart insight and commentary related to the special.
___________________________________________________

Planet In Peril Senior Photojournalist Philip Littleton with Lisa Ling on assignment

Philip Littleton
Senior Photojournalist

Looking for lines. The challenge of finding where humans bumped heads with the wild. And so we set off in search of these lines. The journey was to take us to Africa, the Far East, South America and the Arctic.

Where was the line that should have protected the baby elephant and the other sixty-three elephant from the hail of poacher’s bullets in Tchad.

Why did the heavily armed guerrillas senselessly kill the Mountain Gorillas in the DRC? What line did they cross?

Who says the hungry little Cameroonian boy may not eat the porcupine his father hunted from the forest.

What is going to happen to the beautifully barren Alaskan coast line when the slogan “ Drill Baby Drill” becomes a reality? .

How are we going to stop all the sharks from having their fins ripped off for flavoring soup?

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Program Note: CNN’s award-winning Planet in Peril returns this year to examine the conflict between growing populations and natural resources. Anderson Cooper, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, and Lisa Ling travel to the front lines of this worldwide battle.
Watch Planet In Peril: Battle Lines Thursday 9p ET

We devote several days on the blog to smart insight and commentary related to the special.
___________________________________________________

Mat Lebreton
Ecology Director, Global Viral Forecasting Initiative

Sometimes I have to remind myself where I am working, the heart of Africa, at the source of the Congo River… It’s easy to forget that this is a place that many people in the west only imagine visiting and some have never even heard about.

Surrounded by incredible forest and amazing though reclusive wildlife, it would be easy to think of this as a wilderness area, but in fact most places, even far into the forest, have long dynamic histories of habitation and ownership. You can find trees that were planted around an ancient village, tracks to good fishing holes passed from mother to daughter, a fire place in a cave used to shelter from some sudden rain, some broken pots or grinding stones the remnants of an old home… You can also see where people have just collected forest foods like bush mangoes, in the mountains where they have collected bush medicines like the bark from Prunus trees and where someone has placed a trap ready to capture an unwary animal. It’s a people’s forest.

Balancing the needs of people and nature is a challenge faced in almost every country but in rural central Africa the lives of people are interwoven with the forest, often daily. Many people depend on wildlife or other things from the forest for food, to build houses or for medicine.
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Program Note: CNN’s award-winning Planet in Peril returns this year to examine the conflict between growing populations and natural resources. Anderson Cooper, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, and Lisa Ling travel to the front lines of this worldwide battle.

We devote several days on the blog to smart insight and commentary related to the special.

___________________________________________________

Shawn Heinrichs

I broke the surface having just completed the last day of diving on some of the most incredible reefs I had ever seen. Floating in the deep blue waters, I looked around and surveyed the dozens of forest covered limestone islands that surrounded me.

This was truly one of the most beautiful places on earth. I was filming the reefs in Raja Ampat off the western tip of Papua in Indonesia, one of the most remote and biologically diverse marine ecosystems on the planet.

Cruising back to our camp, we noticed a small fishing boat anchored in a shallow lagoon within the protected area. Curious, we decided to investigate. As we drew near, we made a grizzly discovery. On the blood soaked deck, covered with buzzing flies, were dozens and dozens of shark fins that had recently been sliced off of small reef sharks.

Looking into the water, an odd shape at the bottom caught our attention. Immediately we identified it as the body of a shark. It took all my willpower to control my feelings of anger and frustration. And then I recalled, where sharks should have been abundant on every protected reef, we had not seen sharks the entire week. Now it was clear why. It was also immediately clear what I had to do.

The world needed to see what I was witnessing.

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Ted Cox
Daily Herald Columnist

With the presidential election over, how are the major cable networks going to generate the sort of hysteria that builds Nielsen ratings?

Everybody, it seems, is going green.

Yes, the apocalyptic environmental special - the end of the world is near, and all that - has never been hotter, not even back in the days when Walter Cronkite was looking ahead to “The 21st Century,” a show that provided a generation of Baby Boom science classes with film diversions.

CNN’s occasional and appropriately titled series “Planet in Peril” is no exception as it returns with its second installment at [9 PM ET] Thursday, Dec. 11, but then again let’s be sure to place it in context. After all, it’s a lot more responsible to be crying wolf over the environment in our age of global warming than it is, say, for a cable news outlet to generate mass hysteria over some missing white girl in an Amber Alert.

The latest “Planet in Peril” gets off to a sensationalistic-enough start with Anderson Cooper and CNN’s chief medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta looking for the potential outbreak of the next AIDS epidemic with “virus hunter” Dr. Nathan Wolfe. They trace the rising consumption of “bush meat” in central Africa, where a virulent disease could easily jump species, with global implications. In fact, it already has, in the form of AIDS and monkey pox…

Read More…

Program Note: CNN’s award-winning Planet in Peril returns this year to examine the conflict between growing populations and natural resources. Anderson Cooper, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, and Lisa Ling travel to the front lines of this worldwide battle.
Watch Planet In Peril: Battle Lines Thursday 9p ET

We devote several days on the blog to smart insight and commentary related to the special.
___________________________________________________

Check out these pictures from Planet In Peril: Battle lines. Anderson and Dr. Sanjay Gupta join a team determined to stop the next deadly virus before it gets out of the jungle…

Dr. Brian Pike
Global Viral Forecasting Initiative

As far back as I can remember, I’ve been interested in science, biology in particular. But, my interest in viruses and pandemic prevention came fairly late in my career.

Unlike many of my colleagues, who have dedicated their early training to better understanding the complex interactions between humans and potentially deadly viruses, I began my career as a cancer biologist, hoping to better comprehend what happens to biological systems when they go awry. It wasn’t until I was late in my training as a doctoral student that I began to think about starting down the road that I’m on today, investigating the emergence of infectious disease.

My interest in infectious diseases, and viruses in particular, is an outgrowth of my experience working with HIV-infected children. I was a volunteer at home for sick children that is located on the campus of the National Institutes of Health, “The Children’s Inn”. This experience gave me the opportunity to see, first hand, the devastation that this disease has on individuals and families. I witnessed the struggles that parents went through as they and their children suffered with the infection. This experience had a profound impact on me.

Keep reading

Program Note: CNN’s award-winning Planet in Peril returns this year to examine the conflict between growing populations and natural resources. Anderson Cooper, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, and Lisa Ling travel to the front lines of this worldwide battle.
Watch Planet In Peril: Battle Lines Thursday 9p ET

We devote several days on the blog to smart insight and commentary related to the special.
_____________________________________________________

Coy contracted monkeypox through contact with bush meat. She'll be quarantined for weeks — there's no cure.

Anderson Cooper

The animals are gone.

Deep in a remote region of Cameroon, we are following two hunters looking for bush meat — forest animals they can kill to feed their families. They’ve spent hours in the forest already, but all the traps they’ve set are empty. They will have to push deeper into the forest and they may be hunting for days.

Last year, rising food prices touched off riots around the world, killing dozens of people. Unable to afford basic supplies, communities in Central Africa are increasingly turning to the forests for food. In doing so, hunters expose themselves to hidden dangers - microscopic pathogens living in the blood of forest animals.

Most of the viruses are harmless, but some are potentially deadly when passed to humans. Scientists point out there’s nothing new about these viruses. What is new is the frequency of people’s contact with them and how easily they can now be spread around the world.

World-renowned epidemiologist Dr. Nathan Wolfe is following the hunters.

Read More…

Editor’s note: CNN’s award-winning Planet in Peril returns this year to examine the conflict between growing populations and natural resources. Anderson Cooper, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, and Lisa Ling travel to the front lines of this worldwide battle. Ling has been a co-host of The View, correspondent for The Oprah Winfrey Show, National Geographic and Channel One. She filed this blog from Nigeria.

Lisa Ling
AC360° Special Correspondent

I’m so upset by what I experienced here today that I can barely think straight.

I’m in the Niger Delta in southern Nigeria, a place essential to the U.S. economy.
The communities along the delta literally live atop a virtual goldmine—black gold that literally make’s the world’s engines run. Oil. Underneath the surface of the ground here, lies one of the richest sources of crude oil on the planet.

Nigeria is the 5th largest supplier of oil to the United States and is the 12th biggest oil producer in the world. It was discovered here in the 1950’s, and big oil companies have been pumping hundreds of billions of dollars worth of oil out of the ground here ever since. Over the years, it’s made some people colossally rich. Colossally.

Logic would suggest that the people living above this tremendously lucrative resource would benefit from its riches. But the situation here defies logic. The millions of people who live along the delta are considered some of the world’s poorest. There is no electricity and clean water and basic services like medicine and quality education are severely lacking.

How can this be?
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Check out the amazing photographs from the Planet in Peril team’s trip to Chad. Special Correspondent Lisa Ling is in Zakouma National Park in southeastern Chad, to report on the disappearance of the Central African Elephant from the region.