Italian photographer Francesco Scipioni spent a day photographing the workings of a slaughterhouse. The experience compelled him to make a change in his life: he became a vegetarian.
It’s not hard to see why (full photoset is here):
Author: timzimmermann
Is There Such A Thing As A Sustainably Farmed Fish?
I have long doubted it, but this guy thinks he may have cracked the code:
Goldman chose barramundi because their personalities are “tame, gregarious, and kind of patient” — well-suited to life in tanks. And, unlike most fish, which only obtain omega-3s from the plankton and algae — or other fish — that they eat, barramundi can actually synthesize them on their own. “They spend a lot of their early life cycle in freshwater, so they’re not exposed to the long-chain fatty acids,” explains Goldman. “They actually develop the ability to build omega-3s without necessarily having to consume them.”
This is key to the barramundi’s claims to sustainability. One pound of farmed bluefin tuna can require as much as 20 pounds of wild fish as feed; for farmed salmon, the ratio is often well above 3 to 1. That means a host of problems: depleting the biomass of the oceans at a faster pace, decimating so-called “forage fish” that serve as a staple in poor countries, and, since some estimates say aquaculture demands will outpace fish meal production within decades, undermining the industry itself.
“Everybody on the marine side is really focused on reducing fish meal and oil” in fish feed, says Goldman. “There’s a consensus on that — that it’s really, really important.”
It’s hard to say what the animal and environmental impacts of scaling this sort of operation to real significance will be. But my guess is that any flaws would begin to become pronounced at that stage. And like all industrial food farming operations it has a bit too much of a Sorcerer’s Apprentice feel to me.
Give Goldman credit for trying to address the very real problems of overfishing and environmentally destructive aquaculture. But maybe we should all just start coming to grips with the fact that our animal-eating tastes are overtaxing the planet and its other species, and start learning to love tofu.
I’m Standing At My Desk Right Now….
….here’s why:
Just as we were all settling in front of the television to watch the baseball playoffs, two new studies about the perils of sitting have spoiled our viewing pleasure.
The research, published in separate medical journals this month, adds to a growing scientific consensus that the more time someone spends sitting, especially in front of the television, the shorter and less robust his or her life may be.
This is research that is not counter-intuitive. Using television-watching as a proxy for time spent sitting or being sedentary, researchers found:
Every single hour of television watched after the age of 25 reduces the viewer’s life expectancy by 21.8 minutes.
By comparison, smoking a single cigarette reduces life expectancy by about 11 minutes, the authors said.
Looking more broadly, they concluded that an adult who spends an average of six hours a day watching TV over the course of a lifetime can expect to live 4.8 years fewer than a person who does not watch TV.
Those results hold true, the authors point out, even for people who exercise regularly. It appears, Dr. Veerman says, that “a person who does a lot of exercise but watches six hours of TV” every night “might have a similar mortality risk as someone who does not exercise and watches no TV.”
I ride my bike alot, but I also spend a lot of time sitting infront of a computer. I’ll try to stand more, but the deeper issue, I think, is that modern human culture puts people in chairs, and in front of screens, much more than it puts them on their feet or outside. I haven’t figured out how to solve that paradox in my own life yet, but I am working on it.
Why Doesn’t Mark Bittman Just Come Right Out With It?
NYT writer Mark Bittman writes about food, and has long been troubled by the impact of our food choices on health, the environment, and the animals use in the food production system. He’s got the setup to the problem right, as here:
Nothing affects public health in the United States more than food. Gun violence kills tens of thousands of Americans a year. Heart disease, cancer, stroke and diabetes kill more than a million people a year — nearly half of all deaths — and diet is a root cause of many of those diseases.
And the root of that dangerous diet is our system of hyper-industrial agriculture, the kind that uses 10 times as much energy as it produces.
We must figure out a way to un-invent this food system. It’s been a major contributor to climate change, spawned the obesity crisis, poisoned countless volumes of land and water, wasted energy, tortured billions of animals… I could go on. The point is that “sustainability” is not only possible but essential: only by saving the earth can we save ourselves, and vice versa.
But given his diagnosis of the problem, I keep thinking he will eventually come right out and urge the world to go vegetarian (and he has written an excellent vegetarian cookbook). Yet for some reason he prefers to nibble his way toward that highly logical recommendation, without ever fully voicing it, which is a shame because there are few changes any human can make that match going meatless for beneficial impact on health, the environment, and animal welfare.
For example, after the setup above, Bittman goes on to write:
I believe that the two issues that will have the greatest reverberations in agriculture, health and the environment are reducing the consumption of sugar-laden beverages and improving the living conditions of livestock.
I have no problem with less sugar, which indeed would improve human health and reduce human impact on the environment. But just substitute “and dramatically reducing or eliminating the consumption of meat” for “and improving the living conditions of livestock” and his sentence (and argument) would make so much more sense.
I am all for attacking the mindblowing animal cruelty embedded in our food production system. But c’mon, Mark. Why not just flat out urge your audience to give up meat? I know it sounds radical, but everything you write about food simply screams for that conclusion.
Ozymandias Award: Shell Oil Kulluck
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away”.
[Backstory is here].
Frontline: A Whale Of A Business
First aired in 1997, PBS Frontline’s A Whale Of A Business was the pioneering investigation of the business and practices of marine mammal parks. The reporting and materials Frontline gathered and put online were invaluable when I first started to report Killer In The Pool.
Now the documentary has been uploaded to YouTube and you can watch the entire report PBS aired.
Cycling Will Save The World: Reason #463
So it’s not only good for your health, it’s good for your brain.
No surprise here, of course, or for anyone who is a devoted cyclist, and equates a good ride with maintaining sanity.
But it is pretty impressive when you take a look at the evident mental benefits:
Several studies have shown that exercises including cycling make us smarter. Danish scientists who set out to measure the benefits of breakfast and lunch among children found diet helped but that the way pupils travelled to school was far more significant. Those who cycled or walked performed better in tests than those who had travelled by car or public transport, the scientists reported last month. Another study by the University of California in Los Angeles showed that old people who were most active had 5 per cent more grey matter than those who were least active, reducing their risk of developing Alzheimer’s.
But what is about cycling that leads me to believe it has a peculiar effect? John Ratey is a Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and the author of Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain. He can’t point to a specific reason but says he has seen patients whose severe depression has all but disappeared after they started to cycle.
Rhythm may explain some of the effects. “Think about it evolutionarily for a minute,” he says. “When we had to perform physically, those who could find an altered state and not experience the pain or a drag on endurance would have been at an advantage. Cycling is also increasing a lot of the chemistry in your brain that make you feel peaceful and calm.”
At the same time, the focus required to operate a bicycle, and for example, to negotiate a junction or jostle for space in a race, can be a powerful medicine. Dr Ratey cites a study his department is currently conducting. More than 20 pupils with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are expected to show improved symptoms after a course of cycling.
The link between cycling and ADHD is well established. It’s “like taking a little bit of Prozac and a little bit of Ritalin,” Dr Ratey says. Ritalin is a stimulant commonly used to treat ADHD in children by boosting levels of neural transmitters. Exercise can achieve the same effect, but not all exercise is equal.
In a German study involving 115 students at a sports academy, half the group did activities such as cycling that involved complex co-ordinated movements. The rest performed simpler exercises with the same aerobic demands. Both groups did better than they had in concentration tests, but the “complex” group did a lot better.
Cycling has even been shown to change the structure of the brain. In 2003, Dr Jay Alberts, a neuroscientist at the Cleveland Clinic Lerner Research Institute in Ohio, rode a tandem bicycle across the state with a friend who has Parkinson’s to raise awareness of the disease. To the surprise of both riders, the patient showed significant improvements.
Dr Alberts conducted an experiment, the results of which were reported last month. He scanned the brains of 26 Parkinson’s patients during and a month after an eight-week exercise programme using stationary bikes.
Half the patients were allowed to ride at their own pace, while the others were pushed incrementally harder, just as the scientist’s tandem companion had been. All patients improved and the “tandem” group showed significant increases in connectivity between areas of grey matter responsible for motor ability. Cycling, and cycling harder, was helping to heal their brains.
I’d say this certainly qualifies as severe mental stimulation (saw this on the plane home this week; ridiculous in most respects, though redeemed entirely by the sheer pleasure of watching the riding sequences):
The Orcas Strike Back?
Just downloaded this intriguing Kindle book, which I found referenced on David Kirby’s Take Part blog post about captive orcas and 2013.
Here’s the description:
Enigmatic billionaire Mitchell Chandler churns out obscene profits at his aquatic theme parks driven by the spectacular killer whale exhibits.
Then the orca at Chandler’s Seattle Park dies. Now the animal rights activists have all the ammo they need to shut him down.
But Chandler has a plan: Blackmail commercial fisherman Zora Flynn into capturing a replacement whale—and use Zora’s mother as bait.
Forced into the orca hunt, Zora encounters a never-before-seen species of killer whale—creatures of mind-bending size, speed, and intelligence.
As awe-struck scientists race to understand the whales’ sudden appearance, Zora and Chandler come face-to-face with each other and the chilling truth: the mighty orcas have simply returned… to exact justice.
Sounds like a revenge fantasy worth reading. I’ll report back after I’ve done just that.
2012 in review
Using “helper monkeys” is probably not the right way to compile an annual report for a blog that cares about animal rights, but they did a nice job.
So thanks for reading and helping keep this blog active and interesting. Let’s see what we can come up with in 2013.
From WordPress:
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
19,000 people fit into the new Barclays Center to see Jay-Z perform. This blog was viewed about 130,000 times in 2012. If it were a concert at the Barclays Center, it would take about 7 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.
I’m Out The Door
I’ll be away with my family through the New Year, so blogging will be minimal–and maybe even non-existant!
Enjoy the holidays, and I look forward to a busy, provocative, and constructive 2013.
The Earthist Chronicles 