Great. Germany is playing world-police and detained Sea Shepherd's Paul Watson a week ago [image], based on a 10 year old warmed-up case by Costa Rica. One of the very few who really act on the wholesale emptying of our oceans (instead of just lamenting, posting in blogs etc. ...) is under arrest, while at the same time - surprise surprise - Japan takes the opportunity to start a new whale-killing mission just a few days later. "Resarch" is what the Japanese call a butchery like this [image], or "dolphin harvesting" massacres like that [image], shown also in the documentary "The Cove".

Oh and another reason brought forward to "cull" dolphins is to "protect fishing grounds". Because fishing grounds really need protection from dolphins, as we humans kill(ed) fish only with seine nets up to 2 kilometers in length and 200 meters in depth, or with longlines over 100 kilometers in length, or with drift nets 65 to 280 kilometers in length, all per boat, with maybe 1800 ships just in the Japanese-Taiwanese drift net fleet* -- and above all with bycatch rates of about 25 to 50 percent of the actually used fish, with the bycatch simply being dumped overboard, dead. Dolphins clearly are to be "controlled".

Blame preachy websites for sometimes being hypocritical, but this kind of hypocrisy is disgusting. At least be honest killing the cheapest and most thorough way possible, without giving a damn about fisheries themselves, about even future (human!) generations, let alone sentient non-human life, wiping out complete species like the bluefin tuna, for making the most monetary profit in the shortest time and the most effective ways we can conceive, for a culture of sushi and superfluity.

So there is finally one who really cares and acts, and Germany feels obliged to detain that person, for very doubtful reasons, to the great satisfaction of the ocean-emptying industry one may assume. L'Allemange - zero points.

*drift net information as per movie about Sea Shepherd, "Confessions of an Eco-Terrorist"

When I was hiking about three years ago on Isle Royale, I was honestly surprised to read on a sign on top of "Mt. Ojibway", that we are - seriously - "managing air". Until then I was under the impression there are some things, which still elude our human hubris and urge to "manage", one of them being the tacitly accepted air pollution our lifestyle brings with it.

"Forest management" (converting real forests into unified rows of prospective lumber, via conversion into clearcuts and money), "Water management" (providing somewhat drinkable water out of an environment where not a single stream is free of contaminants any more), and now "Air management" (whatever that may be; the sign just vaguely stated that "[b]y monitoring air here we are helping to protect clear air everywhere").

But I was even wrong believing "Air Managers" is all we are setting ourselves up as. I hear we are now literally reaching for the stars with "solar radiation management"[image]. Geez!

By now we should clearly see we have been everything else but decent "managers" of our environment. Forests disappearing, rivers contaminated, oceans emptied (and "dead zones" declared), air polluted, land denuded of soil - and we still aim for more: "managing solar radiation".

Much of this is about our urge to be in control. This civilization wants to dominate, wants to so desperately be special among all other life on this planet, that we misinterpret our technological abilities as the proof to be above it all, and take this as justification to wreak havoc around us. The sixth mass extinction of life on this planet? Never mind, we'll manage.
How would we determine whether we are really still in control, or are merely tinkering with unintended effects of previous (then mis-)management, at an ever-increasing scale? Claiming to be "sapiens" we should be wise enough to realize such a situation, instead of killing off our host like a parasite. "Any decent definition of wisdom would include the recognition of the limits of cleverness" I recently read. So true - and I don't see we acknowledge that our wisdom is apparently far too limited to deal with the complexity of life. To me it looks as if we are increasingly reacting instead of acting (with foresight), which does not fit into my definition of wise management.

In other words: is the hubris, believing we are able to manage everything, manageable?

What zoos can teach us though, if not about wildlife, is how separation from the natural world in which we all - humans and non-humans - evolved may transform us, seeing these creature's stereotypies and dulled senses, which are so aptly described in Rilke's poem (see image link). In above mentioned book Derrick Jensen quotes from an interview:

"Nowadays most of us live in cities. That means that most of us live in an insulated cell, completely cut off from any kind of sensory information or sensory experience that is not of our own manufacture. All the sensory information we receive is fabricated, and most of it is mediated by machines.
I think the only thing that makes it bearable is the fact that our sensory capacities are so terribly dimished - just as they are in all domesticates - that we no longer know what we're missing. (...)
And the common experience of victims of sensory deprivation is hallucination. I believe that our received cultural wisdom, our anthropocentric beliefs and ideologies, can easily be seen as institutionalized hallucinations."

Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if we detected symptoms on us as if living in a self-made zoo, and I can't disagree our perceived independence from nature and our belief in human superiority may be hallucinations.

[image]A friend who once showed little to no empathy for bluebirds crashing into his kitchen window, probably would comment alike: it's not our fault, that these birds are not bright enough to properly recognize their surroundings (!). Please add the 1500 grebes, our friend's bluebirds, and the poor bird on the right! to the bird count in July 2008's blog post.

While there, because it is this time of year again, you may add a few thousand which die of insane fireworks, like January this year in Arkansas [image]. Of course, it's again "not our fault" that they can't stay calm with fireworks going off next to them, but, you guessed it, the question really is a different one. Summarized for April's "anniversary" of poisoning the Gulf coast's birds, from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology [image]:

"The question is: how many additonal problems of the kinds that humans provide out there can these populations endure and still persist through time? We keep adding them. We take away habitat, we take away opportunities for breeding, we take away their food, and then we add oil spills. And the question is how much of this can they take before the system itself collapses?"

No further comments, no more preachiness. Just a final link to a nice picture of grebes, which came to my mind when reading about the grebes and the Wal Mart parking lot. A different species, but much nicer circumstances: "Walking on Water" [image] (Steve Gettle Wilderness Images).
wk

Are there any good reasons for permanently trading our natural surroundings for the temporary display of plastic junk? If you desperately want to have Peanuts in your frontyard, consider this here instead:

[image][image]

I am not saying this is necessarily good ("to feed or not to feed"?), but certainly better than wasting energy, mountain streams and whole landscapes for questionable plastic displays. Good thing is, you can have fun with the real peanuts and your backyard wildlife year round :).
Happy Holiday Season!
wk

Instead of the traditional Black Friday Quote, this year a friend's most dramatic poem for ysmad - here it goes :)

 UPON SPREADING THE WORD

 Your share makes a difference
 so do more than a pittance
 If you want full nature to go the distance
 be gentle, diplomatic to those with resistance
 be kind charismatic and persuasive
 Not tuff or stubborn nor invasive
 Still allow for mobility,
 while increasing regions representing tranquility
 thereby demonstrating sustainability.

 We all have to work hard and right,
 be good stewards, keep up the fight.
 Work sincere with all your might,
 Hold balance of nature within our sight,
 for clarity of day and peace at night.
 We can't let too much build up stank
 consume the volume of our air tank.
 We can't populate too much or alas,
 non-evenly distribute biomass.
 Strive for continuing freshness and worth
 within this finite island Earth.

 Brooklyn Jakob Jones

Roughly 3 years ago the population counter on ysmad's homepage showed "6,700,000,000", 6.7 billion people. This month, the human population on Earth will have added 300 million more of its species. An article on "sigularityhub.com" put it like that: "There are plenty of reasons to feel queasy while looking at the bacteria-like rate of growth on world population charts. The most obvious question in my mind: where are the walls of our petri dish?".

Looking at the graph on the same page [image] it seems regardless how far the walls are away, they will be reached soon with our staggering exponential growth the last couple decades. Other life is vanishing - preachy assertion! - at a similar rate. We can not take inventory of the species around us fast enough, as they are disappearing. We catalog e.g. by "critically endangered", "endangered", "vulnerable", and start counting individuals of remaining species. In their issue 10/2008 National Geographic listed all remaining (adult) individuals of the North Atlantic right whale, on three pages. About whooping cranes I just learnt that crane "W1-06" had offspring in May, which was worth a press release. Involved conservationists are hoping to (re-)establish three self-sustaining flocks. This will allow us to consider the species one level less threatened. Three flocks of a bird species! Alarmingly meager goals we have to set ourselves for saving fellow creatures on this planet, from ourselves.

This planet was once teeming with flocks of birds, so large, they were "darkening the sky" and needed "days to pass". It is beyond imagination to what extent we reduced life in just a few hundred years (recommended read: "Sea of Slaughter"). Back then there were just a half to one billion of us; this month we'll be seven billion, in 13 years we'll be eight billion.

There are limits to growth. Let's hope at the upper end of the curve there will be enough environment left to sustain us, somewhat content with whatever remains. "The greatest challenge of the twenty-first century is to settle humanity down and accommodate 8 to 10 billion people with a decent standard of living before they wreck the planet. (...) Humanity's responsibility to the rest of life and to future generations is clear: bring with us as much of the environment and biodiversity through the bottleneck [of peak-population] as possible." (Edward O. Wilson in a foreword to "The Diversity of Life")
wk

Here is something positive, as promised:

Hold on - is the message "consume to save" again?!

Notice the first couple lines - "Keeping our planet beautiful can be as simple as drinking a beer". Not only this reminds me of a campaign some years ago in Germany, where the beer-drinking audience was encouraged to buy beer of a certain brand, because "for every crate of beer 1 square meter of rainforest will be protected". At the end of the campaign(s) the company announced to have saved "millions of square meters" of rainforest. E.g. 2008 "13,669,187 square meters". That is to say 14 square kilometers or 3400 acres.

Greenwashing? For one, the brewery did not actually buy any rainforest land as their campaign suggested, but only helped to protect forests in an already exsting nature preserve. But also the contribution-to-fuss ratio was kind of sad. Only a few cents for each crate of beer has been given for the cause, and the total support given must have been at some permille of their sales (at sales of at least 450 million each year, a conservation fund of 4 million has been established, over several years). You could do much more good by buying local beer from next town, saving the environment shipping of crates across the country, and donating dollars instead of cents directly to a conservation organization actually buying rainforest land.

Well, to be fair, the campaign made (some) people think about the cause, and potentially sparked additional initiatives. That is priceless. I like to think this campaign has been with good intentions.

Back to "onepercentfortheplanet". I like this a lot better :) It does not ask to buy more stuff, but offers to make amends, to give a percentage of our consumerism back to the planet. I like the idea of an "Earth tax (...) taxing ourselves for being polluters, for using up non-renewable resources" (founder Yvon Chouinard). May sound a bit like the church preaching to us "sinners" who have to ask for forgiveness, just that here it's not for eating apples, but for eating the whole planet. And preaching is what I can do, too.

What if we extended the 1% for the planet idea from businesses to consumers? I'd support a one percent (or more) tax on every dollar earned, as eventually every dollar earned will have been taken from this planet – and most dollars unsustainable at that.

So, let's start with a voluntary 1% of everyone's gross income for environmental programs - where, by the way, money spent on mentioned beer crates does not count. Find that on our practice-what-you-preach green tips list. Cheers!
wk

I did not have to dig long for some material on homo sapiens as an invasive species. Here is a common definition of "invasive species" as found on Wikipedia today:

[image]"(...) plants or animals that adversely affect the habitats and bioregions they invade economically, environmentally, and/or ecologically. They disrupt by dominating a region, wilderness areas, particular habitats, and/or wildland-urban interface land from loss of natural controls (i.e.: predators or herbivores)."

Sounds fitting to humans? Indeed; but we wriggle out of this definition by extending: invasive species are "firstly, outside their natural distribution area, and [only] secondly, threaten biological diversity." - while of course we take it as a given that the whole planet is humanity's "natural distribution area"; even beyond, from below sea bottom to above the atmosphere's limit.

[image]This will quickly get into a discussion what "natural distribution", or "natural" generally is. If humans are considered natural everywhere, and we are the distributor of non-native invasive species, aren't these species as natural, everywhere? Also, if we consider industrial civilization kind of a "species" (opposed to indigenous peoples), isn't our civilization an invasive species by the exact definition as mentioned above? Aren't we crowding out not only plant and animal species, but even indigenous peoples; even today to get to cheap oil, timber, gold and other resources?

At the end of the day, it's not the mere existence of a species in a particular area which makes it "invasive", but its exploitative nature. Species which take more out of their landbase than it can provide, are invasive by the very meaning of the word: they are at this moment in time in-vading as they can not have been there for very long; and they will sooner or later be trimmed back to size.

[image]Notably, we are the first species to claim the whole planet our "natural distribution area". It may take a little longer, but also this extensive landbase will stop giving to an exploitative species - "you cannot run a linear system on a finite planet indefinitely" (Story of Stuff [image]).

Recently I heared the statement "I am not exploitative!". Well ... for one, there are studies enough that humans in general, driven by the "western world", are taking more out of this planet that it can provide - e.g. WWF's "Living Planet Report" [image] drew the conclusion that "Humanity's demands exceed our planet's capacity to sustain us". But more concrete, here is a very specific example of exploitation, which most of us contribute in: the electronic gadgets around you like laptop, TV, game console, mobile phone etc. are likely made possible by exploiting people and nature in Africa - see Wikipedia for ethical [image] and environmental [image] impacts of coltan mining. (Sorry I got that wrong recently, it's not rare earth elements, which too are used in electronics and leave behind toxic mining sites, but rather exploit the environment in China [image] than in Africa ...).

So - are humans an invasive species? I should have entered this question into google before all my preaching - here is another take on this question [image]. I rather agree with a comment on this article: we are invasive. Environmentally destructive, and the greatest perpetrators of the destruction of species diversity on this small planet.
Next blog post will be something more positive. Promise!
wk