Author: timzimmermann

Manatee Madness

I’m working on a story about environmental threats to the Indian River Lagoon (IRL), and the unusual mortality events in which both manatees and dolphins are dying in record numbers in 2013.

The story is mostly about how development impacts the water quality in the IRL, and how that might affect the health of manatees and dolphins. But humanity also poses a direct threat to manatees, both from boat strikes as well as from wanting to get close to lovable manatees.

Treehugger recently posted a story about the latter problem, featuring a saddening time-lapse video of all the human activity around a favorite manatee winter gathering spot–a place where they are trying to keep warm and conserve energy in the winter:

Here, in a timelapse video made by Mittermeier and fellow photographer Neil Ever Osborne, you can see just how much interaction the manatees are forced to deal with all day, every day. You’ll even see a manatee stampede, which happens when a sudden loud noise onshore scares them. Mittermeier states that this happens several times a day. The video reveals just how little space manatees get for themselves, and how much more protection we need to be offering these animals who are, we cannot forget, members of an endangered species.

It doesn’t look very restful for the manatees. And the exclusion area set up is pathetically small. This is one of the many paradoxes of humanity: we often harm even the things we say we love.

Ocean Agonistes

The more we learn about what is happening in the oceans, the more we understand about how bad the trends are. That truth is perfectly captured by the latest State Of The Ocean report, which is a global look at what science is telling us about how the oceans are faring. Here’s the key point of the Executive Summary:

The scientific evidence that marine ecosystems are being degraded as a direct result of human activities is
overwhelming; and the consequences both for the vital and valuable ocean goods and services we rely on,
including for the maintenance of a healthy Earth system, are alarming. Recent assessments by the UN’s
climate change panel the IPCC, for example, show that these changes are progressive and relentless: whilst
terrestrial temperature increases may be experiencing a pause this is not true for the ocean, which
continues to warm regardless. For the most part, however, the public and policymakers are failing to
recognize –or choosing to ignore— the severity of the situation and are not taking the action necessary to
address it.

The International Programme on the State of the Ocean (IPSO) is publishing a set of five papers on ocean
stresses, impacts and solutions by leading international experts to present the key findings of the workshops
it held in 2011and 2012* in partnership with IUCN and its World Commission on Protected Areas. The
purpose of these workshops, and the papers published today, is to promote a holistic, integrated view of
both the challenges faced and the actions needed to achieve a healthy global ocean for the future.

The central messages from the workshops are that the risks to the ocean and the ecosystems it supports
have been significantly underestimated; that the extent of marine degradation as a whole is greater than
the sum of its parts; and that it is happening at a much faster rate than previously predicted.

The 2012 workshop additionally reviewed new material and evidence, available since the workshop in
2011, and concluded that the threats to the ocean were even faster, bigger and closer than the first
workshop set out: faster with an accelerated rate of change, bigger in scale, and closer in time in terms of
the impacts being felt.

Yes, it’s alarming. But instead of turning away, the right response, as with climate change, is to imagine even more radical and deeper changes in the way humans live and do business, and build the grassroots political will to actually make the sacrifices needed to make a difference. No  more nibbling around the edges. Time to reinvent humanity, which would not only be good for the planet, it would be good for humanity.

Here’s a good example of the sort of choice (and there are thousands of choices just like it) that could determine whether we start to protect the oceans instead of ruthlessly exploiting the oceans for financial profit–the question of whether to ban deep-sea trawls:

The biodiversity of the deep sea is equaled only by that of tropical rain forests, and the destruction of rain forests has long been known to affect biodiversity and the global climate. Similarly the deep sea is home to countless species, including the oldest known living animal and to life-forms found nowhere else. Ninety percent of the ocean is below 200 meters, but not much is known about life in the deep sea; expensive research sampling has been done in about 1 percent of this vast area.

Over the years, as fisheries in shallow waters collapsed, the fishing industry began looking to the deep for new species to exploit. Most deep-sea fish have flesh that is not palatable, but a few were found that could be marketed for human consumption, if filleted and renamed to be made more attractive, or for processing into food pellets for poultry. These stocks were readily attacked using trawls large and heavy enough to reach as deep as 2,000 meters, and it took only 10 to 15 years to reduce the fish biomass by about 80 percent.

In 2011, vessels from eight E.U. countries landed 15,000 metric tons of four species of marketable deep-sea fish, which represents only 0.4 percent of Europe’s fish haul. Several deep-sea fish species are poorly fertile (2 to 4 juveniles a year for the shark Centrophorus) and others reproduce for the first time when quite old (up to 32 years). Most of them are more biological curiosities than fishing stocks.

Bottom trawls are not selective; in the Northeast Atlantic alone they catch untold amounts of more than 100 species of fish. Deep-sea bottom communities harbor species that can be large, but are delicate and fragile, such as corals and sponges. Deep-sea corals are not what we are used to seeing in tropical waters, and with a few exceptions they do not build massive reef structures. Instead, many are more akin to trees, sometimes more than three meters high, and sometimes very old, often reaching more than 100 years and occasionally more than 4,000 years. These are smashed by trawl gear. Bottom images of trawled deep-sea areas, and two seamounts I visited with a deep-diving remote vehicle, show that nothing is left standing in the wake of this type of fishing gear.

Reinventing humanity means reinventing how we manage the Earth’s resources. Nation states claiming sovereignty over large swathes of coast waters, where they do what they please, and competing relentlessly and ruthlessly with one another to out-compete and out-exploit each other in the vast swathes of the oceans that are not regulated, is a failing model. The oceans need to be treated as a global resource that is managed for the benefit of the oceans and for all of humanity, through the UN or through an international collaboration of likeminded states with the will and tools to impose real consequences on violations. My guess is the best model would be as large a group of likeminded states who would use their economic and political influence to try and create a new set or priorities and regulations related to climate and the oceans.

Ridiculous, idea, I know. Never gonna happen. Well, the alternative is increasingly apparent, and it is disastrous. Incrementalism is the same as failure. So why shouldn’t we think in revolutionary terms? What other option is there?

A Minimalist Experiment

What would life be like if you set completely different priorities? Here’s one answer:

If someone told me seven years ago, in my final year of a business and economics degree, that I’d now be living without money, I’d have probably choked on my microwaved ready meal. The plan back then was to get a ‘good’ job, make as much money as possible, and buy the stuff that would show society I was successful.

For a while I did it – I had a fantastic job managing a big organic food company; had myself a yacht on the harbour. If it hadn’t been for the chance purchase of a video calledGandhi, I’d still be doing it today. Instead, for the last fifteen months, I haven’t spent or received a single penny. Zilch.

The change in life path came one evening on the yacht whilst philosophising with a friend over a glass of merlot. Whilst I had been significantly influenced by the Mahatma’s quote “be the change you want to see in the world”, I had no idea what that change was up until then. We began talking about all major issues in the world – environmental destruction, resource wars, factory farms, sweatshop labour – and wondering which of these we would be best devoting our time to. Not that we felt we could make any difference, being two small drops in a highly polluted ocean.

But that evening I had a realisation. These issues weren’t as unrelated as I had previously thought – they had a common root cause. I believe the fact that we no longer see the direct repercussions our purchases have on the people, environment and animals they affect is the factor that unites these problems. The degrees of separation between the consumer and the consumed have increased so much that it now means we’re completely unaware of the levels of destruction and suffering embodied in the ‘stuff’ we buy.

Very few people actually want to cause suffering to others; most just don’t have any idea that they directly are. The tool that has enabled this separation is money, especially in its globalised format.

Take this for an example: if we grew our own food, we wouldn’t waste a third of it as we do today.

If we made our own tables and chairs, we wouldn’t throw them out the moment we changed the interior décor.

If we had to clean our own drinking water, we probably wouldn’t shit in it.

So to be the change I wanted to see in the world, it unfortunately meant I was going to have to give up money, which I decided to do for a year initially. So I made a list of the basics I’d need to survive. I adore food, so it was at the top. There are four legs to the food-for-free table: foraging wild food, growing your own, bartering and using waste grub, of which there far too much.

This guy is no doubt busy, but in a good way. I don’t know what our culture and economy would look like if everyone tried to live like this. But I do know that there is probably a hybrid somewhere in between a system of consumerist capitalism and this sort of minimalism. And I think it mostly could be catalyzed if the costs of everything reflected their environmental and social costs as well as their production costs. We’d produce less, earn less, consume less. And production and marketing would be completely transformed.

The Case Against “Busy”

Writer Tim Krieder offers a bracing and insightful rebuttal to the idea that we should measure our lives by how busy and productive we are:

My own resolute idleness has mostly been a luxury rather than a virtue, but I did make a conscious decision, a long time ago, to choose time over money, since I’ve always understood that the best investment of my limited time on earth was to spend it with people I love.

Naturally, as a person who has long valued time over money, he is singing my favorite hymn. But I am convinced that changing the way we value time and money (and how we spend our time; I prefer outdoors, with people, away from the electronic assault), is the key to reinventing not only how we live and seek happiness, but how human culture impacts the Earth. The current formula–work, earn, consume–is a disaster for the planet and doesn’t deliver happiness. A different approach that values time over money, nature and outdoor activity over manufactured entertainment, and personal relationships over consumption, I think, would go a long way toward bringing humanity into balance with the planet. Throw in an emphasis on compassion, tolerance, and selflessness, and you start to imagine a wholly different, and wholly more appealing, future.

Another Blackfish Film…

Also powerful. This one is for all you pescatarians out there (via).

Is Soy Bad For You?

Hmm.

Men’s Health, cue scary music, takes you one way:

The unassuming soybean has silently infiltrated the American diet as what might just be the perfect protein source: It’s cheap and vegetarian, and could even unclog our hearts. But there may be a hidden dark side to soy, one that has the power to undermine everything it means to be male….

….Long the foundation of a vegetarian diet, tofu provides protein with little of the saturated fat and none of the moral indigestion that comes with meat. Moreover, in the past decade, research has emerged suggesting that scarfing down soy may also play an active role in extending our lives. In 1999,soy protein earned a highly coveted FDA-allowed health claim: Diets that include 25 grams—about a pound of tofu—a day may reduce the risk of heart disease. Add to this the number of studies showing that soy protein might also help protect against prostate cancer, and suddenly the stuff starts looking like powerful medicine for men.

Of course, most medicines have side effects. And when you consume soy protein, you’re actually courting the Mr. Hyde side of two natural drugs: genistein and daidzein. Both act so similarly to estrogen that they’re known as phytoestrogens (plant-produced estrogens). Soybeans couldn’t care less about human sex characteristics—genistein and daidzein may have evolved to act as chemical defenses against fungi and grazing animals. (They aren’t very effective deterrents, apparently, since soy meal is widely used to feed livestock.) But when humans consume these compounds in high enough quantities, they may experience gender-bending nightmares like James Price’s (TZ note: he grew breasts and cried more at movies]. What’s more, studies of these phytoestrogens in leading peer-reviewed medical journals suggest that even lower doses—such as the amount in the 25-gram soy proteintarget cited by the FDA—have the potential to wreak hormonal havoc.

And then the New York Times, cue soothing music, debunks the other way:

As far as any downside, most of the health concerns about soy stem from its concentration of phytoestrogens, a group of natural compounds that resemble estrogen chemically. Some experts have questioned whether soy might lower testosterone levels in men and cause problems for women who have estrogen-sensitive breast cancers. Animal studies have found, for example, that large doses of phytoestrogens can fuel the growth of tumors.

But phytoestrogens mimic estrogen only very weakly. A number of clinical studies in men have cast doubt on the notion that eating soy influences testosterone levels to any noticeable extent. And most large studies of soy intake and breast cancer rates in women have not found that it causes any harm, said Dr. Anna H. Wu of the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California. In fact, work by Dr. Wu and others has found that women who consume the equivalent of about one to two servings of soy daily have a reduced risk of receiving a diagnosis of breast cancer and of its recurrence.

Still, some women who have developed breast cancer remain particularly worried about eating soy. But the evidence “is overwhelming that it’s safe,” said Dr. Bette Caan of the Kaiser Permanente Northern California Division of Research, who has studied soy intake and breast cancer. “If people enjoy soy as a regular part of their diet,” she said, “there’s no reason to stop.”

Confusing, no? And a perfect example of how difficult it can be to find a clear answer to a simple question. But I think I will go with the clinical trials and the New York Times, rather than anecdotal scare stories, on this one. And buy a bra.

How’s America Doing?

Not so great, according to the World Economic Forum:

So says the forum’s new Human Capital Index, which rates the United States 16th globally in how well it harnesses the power of its people. The nation gets good scores for education and opportunity. But the disappointing overall outcome is because of things like “non-communicable diseases.”

Before you holler “gross” and click elsewhere, these are non-communicable ailments – things like obesity, diabetes and heart disease. The United States ranks 112th out of 122, for example, on the obesity scale, and similarly low when it comes to stress. The overall “Health and Wellness” score places the United States 43rd out of the countries studied, with a particularly poor rating for the “business impact” of disease overall (including the communicable type, where we are 65th…gross!).

Sorta at odds with our “greatest country in the world” self-image. Reminds me of this:

The Media #FAIL On Climate Change

I’ve long thought that if Dr. Evil, or an alien race, or Al Qaeda, threatened to slowly warm the planet, acidify the oceans, intensify extreme weather events, wipe out or alter countless species and habitats, and flood low-lying countries, the global media, and the US media in particular, would treat it as the greatest threat to humanity since fascism. Headlines would scream. Editorials would scathe. News article after news article would detail the latest evolution of the threat and its implications. The media would go into full war-footing mode and treat an existential threat like a, well, existential threat. Which is to say it would be given the prominence that it truly deserves.

But if we–humans–are doing it to ourselves, not so much. As the full impact of climate change accelerates and makes itself felt, how the media handled climate change in our era will be a perfect case study in failure to report and communicate the most important news. And it will look all the worse to future generations of media scholars in contrast to the infotainment and twerking obsessions that instead dominate the media.

It may be understandable that the public–endlessly poking away at its smartphones in search of the latest meaningless distraction–gives the media a free pass on the epic climate change fail. But thinkers and leaders don’t get the same pass on not calling out the media. So it is nice to see Al Gore speaking plainly:

Gore, the former vice president who should have been president but instead used Powerpoint to put climate change on a lot of regular folks’ radars, is not shy about using his outsized soapbox. He was blunt in sharing his reflections Friday during a talk at the Brookings Institution. Here are some choice quotes, as transcribed by The Hill:

“Here in the U.S., the news media has been intimidated, frightened, and not only frightened, they are vulnerable to distorted news judgments because the line separating news and entertainment has long since been crossed, and ratings have a big influence on the selection of stories that are put on the news.”

“And the deniers of the climate crisis, quite a few of them paid by the large fossil fuel polluters — really it is like a family with an alcoholic father who flies into a rage if anyone mentions alcohol, and so the rest of the family decides to keep the peace by never mentioning the elephant in the room. And many in the news media are exactly in that position.”

“They get swarmed by these deniers online and in letters and pickets and all that if they even mention the word climate, and so they very timidly, they get frightened and they are afraid to mention the word climate.”

“Their purpose is to condition thinking and to prevent the consideration of a price on carbon. It’s just that simple.”

I think this is right, but there is a feedback loop that intensifies the problem. As Gore notes, the media these days (especially cable TV) is much more about entertainment than it is about truth-telling or reporting inconvenient truths. But I think the media’s reluctance to really report climate change is less about being intimidated by the drunk fathers of climate denialism than it is about a craven effort to throw before the public anything and everything that will get attention, or go viral, or get page views. And downer news about how we are destroying our own planet with lifestyles driven by materialism and self-gratification, is just not…popular (though dramatic superstorm reporting is). At the same time, if you are going to subject your audience to a grim reality it’s vastly more entertaining to put the drunk uncle in the mix, and let him rant against reality, than it is to tell your audience that the drunk uncle is crazy and needs to be ignored.

And that, in turn, creates the impression that the facts are murky, there are two sides to the debate, and that sacrifice or a deep re-thinking of the destructive culture we have perfected over the past 50 years is simply unwarranted.

But, hey, even Al Gore can make climate reality entertaining:

Climate Change As Threat

Here’s some evidence that the media in the US and some other countries is not doing a very good job of explaining the implications of climate change, and how the threat of climate change should be seen relative to other threats. My guess is that far more than 40% of Americans would label “terrorism” a “major threat.” But the sort of terrorism most Americans worry about (bombs on planes, for example) is nothing compared to how climate change will impact humanity and the planet.

There are two existential threats right now. Nuclear terrorism. And climate change. But apparently that’s not the message that the public is getting (click image for full size).

And, of course, in the US climate change belief breaks down along political lines.

Animals And Spying

Fascinating piece by Tom Vanderbilt about how the CIA trained all sorts of animals to help in the Spy vs. Spy Cold War games. BF Skinner wasn’t just useful for training orcas:

While Pavlov plays a part in our story—“I have a saying in the training business,” Bailey says, “Pavlov is always on your shoulder”—the real inspiration is B.F. Skinner, the Harvard University psychologist who was, in the middle of the 20th century, the most cited scholar of the human mind after Freud. Skinner popularized “operant conditioning,” a practice based less on primal reflex responses and more on getting animals (including humans) to do things voluntarily, based on cues in the environment. When “behavior is followed by a consequence,” Skinner wrote, “the nature of the consequence modifies the organism’s tendency to repeat the behavior in the future.” In his famous operant-conditioning chamber, or “box,” an animal learns to associate an action with a reward. He favored pigeons, which received food for pecking at certain buttons.

During World War II, Skinner received defense funding to research a pigeon-based homing device for missiles. (The birds would be housed in the nose cone; their pecking would activate steering engines.) It was never deployed, but the project captured the imagination of two of his graduate students, Keller Breland and his wife, Marian. They left Skinner’s lab in 1947 and went into business in Minnesota as Animal Behavior Enterprises, or ABE. Their main client was General Mills, for whom they trained chickens and other animals for shows advertising General Mills feed at county fairs.

Their business gradually expanded, to zoos and theme parks and appearances on “The Tonight Show” and “Wild Kingdom.” They trained a slew of animals for TV commercials, including Buck Bunny, the coin-depositing rabbit protagonist of a Coast Federal Savings Bank commercial that set a record for repeat airings over two decades. In 1955, in their new home of Hot Springs, Arkansas, the Brelands opened the I.Q. Zoo, where visitors would pay, in essence, to watch Skinnerian conditioning in action—even if in the form of basketball-playing raccoons.

The I.Q. Zoo was both a tourist attraction and a proving ground for systems of operant conditioning. The Brelands didn’t just become America’s pre-eminent commercial animal trainers, they also published their observations in scholarly journals like American Psychologist. Everyone from Walt Disney to Florida’s Marineland wanted their advice. It is thus little surprise that they were invited to the Naval Air Weapons Station at China Lake, California, to address a new Navy program on the training of marine mammals for defense work, headed by Bob Bailey. The fact that China Lake, on the western edge of the Mojave Desert, has neither water nor marine mammals is the sort of detail that does not seem out of place in a story like this.

It’s an interesting window into the gain-any-advantage-possible-no-matter-how-nutty mindset that prevailed in a world that seemed always to be on the precipice. I doubt the NSA, in an age where it seems capable of spying on just about everyone and anything, these days feels much need for animal operatives.