The whole concept that humans “own” the fish in the sea is objectionable, but that is the system that humanity has created to try and regulate fishing. And it’s a system that does not work very well, or protect small fishermen.
I would prefer that we figure out an alternative food source to fish, and let the oceans be. But if we are to fish, it needs to be globally managed on the basis of the principle that all earth’s resources should be shared sustainably by all earth’s people–and not according to who has coastline–and quotas should be drastically reduced according to the most conservative scientific evidence regarding what annual take any given fish stock can handle.
We really need the real thing here in the nation’s capital. But for now I will settle for a viewing of Rob Stewart’s new documentary, Revolution, which will screen at the DC Environmental Film Festival (sponsored by GM??!!) this weekend.
Stewart’s Sharkwater was a revelation for audiences. I hope Revolution will be too.
And here is the synopsis:
Revolution is a film about changing the world. The true-life adventure of Rob Stewart, this follow-up to his acclaimed Sharkwater documentary continues his remarkable journey; one that will take him through 15 countries over four years, and where he’ll discover that it’s not only sharks that are in grave danger – it’s humanity itself.
In an effort to uncover the truth and find the secret to saving the ecosystems we depend on for survival, Stewart embarks on a life-threatening adventure. From the coral reefs in Papua New Guinea and deforestation in Madagascar to the largest and most destructive environmental project in history in Alberta, Canada, he reveals that all of our actions are interconnected and that environmental degradation, species loss, ocean acidification, pollution and food/water scarcity are reducing the Earth’s ability to house humans. How did this happen, and what will it take to change the course that humanity has set itself on?
Travelling the globe to meet with the dedicated individuals and organizations working on a solution, Stewart finds encouragement and hope, pointing to the revolutions of the past and how we’ve evolved and changed our course in times of necessity. If people were informed about what was really going on, they would fight for their future – and the future of other generations. From the evolution of our species to the revolution to save it, Stewart and his team take viewers on a groundbreaking mission into the greatest war ever waged.
Startling, beautiful, and provocative, Revolution inspires audiences from across the globe to start a revolution and change the world forever.
That would be nice. If you are in DC and want to join me, just message me via my Facebook page.
The twisted politics and false dilemmas of trying to save the American wolf. These conflicts between human culture and economics on the one hand, and species survival on the other hand, are increasingly legion. So far, the sensibilities and priorities we bring to these issues don’t bode well for the animals.
I have to say, I have particular disdain for claims regarding the romance and pleasure of hunting as a priority or rationale for killing animals.
What about the romance and heritage of one of North America’s iconic species?
The older I get the less enamored with stuff I am, though I was never a big consumer or a hoarder.
This guy has gone to an extreme that I aspire to, and would be perfectly comfortable with (psst, please don’t tell my wife):
I LIVE in a 420-square-foot studio. I sleep in a bed that folds down from the wall. I have six dress shirts. I have 10 shallow bowls that I use for salads and main dishes. When people come over for dinner, I pull out my extendable dining room table. I don’t have a single CD or DVD and I have 10 percent of the books I once did….
We live in a world of surfeit stuff, of big-box stores and 24-hour online shopping opportunities. Members of every socioeconomic bracket can and do deluge themselves with products.
There isn’t any indication that any of these things makes anyone any happier; in fact it seems the reverse may be true.
For me, it took 15 years, a great love and a lot of travel to get rid of all the inessential things I had collected and live a bigger, better, richer life with less.
Read the whole thing and see if you don’t start thinking of all the things you could do without–despite the endless and persistent insistence of the marketers and companies whose livelihoods depend on convincing you otherwise. So far, they have been extraordinarily effective at creating a world in which more is better, and growing a global consumer culture that is poisonous to the planet, to our pocketbooks and lifestyles, and to healthy relationships and society (the values are all wrong).
And once you have come to grips with the idea that you could be happy with one-tenth of the things you are told you need to be happy, imagine what the world would be like if everyone had that same epiphany. Revolution. Enlightenment. Salvation.
When rhino horn has increased in value from $4700 a kilo twenty years ago, to $65,000 a kilo today, radical strategies are needed to address the poaching that is driving the rhino rapidly toward extinction. Kevin Charles Redmon takes a look at the possibility of rhino farming:
As parties to the international Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (Cites) meet in Bangkok this week, a team of Australian conservationists are presenting an unusual—and controversial—proposal: in order to save the remaining African rhinos, farm them for their horns.
The economic logic goes like this: demand for horn is inelastic and growing, so a trade ban (which restricts supply) only drives up prices, making the illicit good more valuable—and giving poachers greater incentive to slaughter the animal.
“Rhino horn is used for dagger handles in Yemen and has been used in Chinese traditional medicine for millennia as a presumed cure for a wide range of ailments,” explains Duan Biggs, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Queensland, in a March issue of Science. “Rapid economic growth in east and southeast Asia is assumed to be the primary factor driving the increased demand for horn.” Conservation managers have even tried preempting poachers by de-horning animals in their care, to no avail; the stubs are simply too valuable to pass up. (As documented in the 2012National Geographic article, “Rhino Wars,” African wildlife conservation has become as militarized as America’s “war on drugs,” with the same miserable failures.)
But horn harvesting need not be an all-or-nothing proposition.
“Rhino horn is composed entirely of keratin and regrows when cut,” writes Biggs. “Sedating a rhino to shave its horn can be done for as little as $20.” A white rhino produces about a kilo of horn per year, and the current global demand could be met by “farming” as few as 5,000 animals on a private, well-guarded preserve. (Natural rhino death “would also provide hundreds of horns annually,” even as the herd continues to grow at a rate near 10 percent.) The millions of dollars generated by the legal enterprise could be used to fund further conservation efforts, such as wildland preservation, sustainable rural development, and field research.
It’s not a solution that feels good. But it is a practical proposal that might actually make a difference, and the times we are in demand progress more than philosophical purity.
Last month Greenpeace threw my minimal-impact (minimal shopping, minimal fashion, minimal thinking) clothing strategy into chaos by calling Levis out regarding hazardous chemicals.
This was a problem, because until then my entire wardrobe was based on Levis jeans, hand-me down clothing from various relatives, and free sailing apparel (which is one of the many perks of writing about the sailing world–though my wife does get embarrassed that most of my shirts that have boat names like “Tsunami” stitched on them).
I didn’t have to think about what to buy or wear. I was happy. But if I couldn’t wear my jeans in good conscience, what could I wear? Happily, the folks at Repair The World, which makes Earth-friendly clothing from recycled cotton scraps and recycled plastic bottles, stepped forward to help me resolve my clothing crisis. (You can read more about Repair The World here).
They took pity on me, and offered to send me one of their shirts, for a test run. So I selected a long sleeve t-shirt, not really knowing what to expect. I was fully prepared for a scratchy, ill-fitting, shirt that might melt if I got too near a lamp. Instead, I opened the mailer to find a shockingly soft, well-made, long-sleeve shirt. Exactly the sort of thing a lazy environmentally conscious person could rely on day after day.
I’ve been wearing it for a week now, and it even (unintentionally) went through a full wash and high heat dryer cycle. Came out fine. (No, I haven’t grown a tail as a result of wearing the shirt; I guess the dog didn’t want to be left out of the photoshoot).
The material is quite thin, so it will be interesting to see how long the shirt lasts. As you can, see I am sticking with my Levis down below (no Anthony Weiner pictures for me; and Levis has agreed to address the problem of chemical release). But it seems that there just might be an ethical clothing solution for those in search of one. And you have to admire the ingenious effort to come up with a clothing fabric that tries to address the environmental shortcomings of cotton (even organic cotton), which takes huge inputs of water and energy to produce and process.
I don’t know if it is something that the mass market will go for (because the mass market is not really that concerned about the future). For anyone who thinks about what they eat, and what they wear, though, Repair The World just might have some clothing for you. If necessary, you can stitch boat names on it yourself.
This isn’t shocking news for most people, who understand that the climate is warming. We get these sorts of stories all the time now (just like we seem to get school shootings; be nice if political leaders would at least think about climate action, too). What most people don’t really understand, though, is the magnitude of change required in the pricing of carbon, and in their lives, to address this threat (which along with nuclear proliferation is clearly the greatest threat facing not just the United States, but humanity). I’m going to try to look into that question in more detail this year.
For now, though, some graphic illustrations of just how far off the charts we are going:
Average annual temperatures for contiguous U.S. Data from NOAA.The Climate Extremes Index in the contiguous U.S. over time. 2012 ranked second highest on record (NOAA NCDC)Difference from average annual temperature in 2012 compared to the 1981-2010 average. (NOAA)
Buzkashi is the Afghan national sport. It’s like polo, except the riders play with a headless, disemboweled goat. Buzkashi Boys is a short film about the ambitions of young Afghan boys that is getting Oscar buzz. It looks like a fascinating journey into the desperation and savagery that poverty and illiteracy can breed.
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.
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.
We really need the real thing here in the nation’s capital. But for now I will settle for a viewing of Rob Stewart’s new documentary, 
The Earthist Chronicles 