[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

[image]Ha! These "news" are long old, and I didn't mean to write about it - but then I stumbled across the cartoon to the right, which fits so perfectly that I had to post my five cents here.
Down Under proudly presented its new idea to cut on carbon emissions: by killing wild (but admittedly, introduced and even invasive) camels. But wait a minute - wasn't that "cap&trade" thing to reduce our (human) demands? In a desparate effort to keep our own consumption habits, we look for "someone else's fault" and do some fingerpointing. To camels! Humans truly have a sense of humor.

Let's compare:

"Camels damage trees and shrubs and can severely defoliate trees, shrubs, and vines." [image]
Well, human beings not only damage, but eradicate forests and whole ecosystems, and do not shy back from defoliating trees, shrubs and vines - in fact, rainforests - with poison (Agent Orange, as you are reading this), to make sure cheap beef from the Amazon is on their plates.

"They can cause degradation of remote waterholes, affecting the ability of native plants and animals to use these refuges during droughts and potentially leading to the local extinction of these species." [image]
Talking about hypocrisy! As if we would care about the extinction of local any species! Humans can, and do degrade whole ecosystems, "affecting" native plants and animals the most thorough way possible, i.e., wiping species out at a rate worth calling it the planet's sixth mass extinction.

"Each camel, according to the champions of a cull, emits 45 kilos (99 pounds) of methane, the equivalent of one tonne a year in carbon dioxide (CO2), the main warming gas." [image]
In comparison: the average Australian contributes about 20 tons of CO2 to the atmosphere; an average car produces 4 times the "camel-equivalent" of CO2 - and there are 1.2 million camels, but about 15 million cars in Australia (compared to 250 million cars in the US by the way). Moreover, there are 25 million beef cattle in Australia. Did I hear anyone proposing "Eat less meat"? Reducing meat consumption of Australia's customers by only 5% would have roughly the same effect as killing 100% of the camels! But No! It's the camels!

It shouldn't surprise us though. This is just stringent to declaring all life on this planet our own. So if it's our own, their CO2 emissions are as well ours - and if these are worth anything (in this case self-granted "emission rights"), we can take them - no matter if it costs their life. In fact we never bothered about taking lives when there was something to gain - compare the turning of virtually any life into green colored paper, down to the last hermit crab we can find, for $5.99.

Tune in for the next blog post when there will be some preachiness about invasive species, including and compared to our own.

Let me get this straight: it's our herd that needs to be "thinned". [image]

wk

I recently read an opinion (in a review on Amazon about "Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals" [image]) that "in most places and most of the time most of us human animals are innocent".
That kept me thinking a couple days :) -- Really?
I can certainly see the point about humans doing "good and inspiring things", as written there. But "most of us, most of the time"? On the contrary I think one could well argue that our whole "civilized" lifestyle is in fact based on a foundation of exploitation, which does not go well with the idea of innocence.

• Our cheap consumer goods exploiting people and the environment in Asia.
• Our electronic gadgets made possible by the exploitation of people and nature in the Congo.
• Our insatiable meat consumption destroying rainforests and other life forms in South America.
• Our oil and (other) energy waste causing havoc around the planet, partly for millenia to come.
• Our activities in general causing an unprecedented mass-extinction of life.
• Our unsustainable overconsumption exploiting even future generations.

That all is happening most of time, every day.
No, "innocent" is not a term which comes to mind.

Ignoring points like the above, or pretending not knowing about it, or claiming we couldn't do anything about it does not make us innocent. Innocence assumes the unability to recognize our own behaviour. But we actually are (or at the very least can be) fully aware of our actions, i.e. the exploitation of others - humans and non-humans alike. You may call an (other) invasive species choking out other lifeforms to its own short-term benefit "innocent": it doesn't know better. In case of the human species that's not the case.

There are however some thoughts in the mentioned book which are worth taking note of: e.g. in section 1-9 the point is made that self-deception is an evolutionary advantage. I guess an assessment like "most people are innocent most of the time" falls into that category, much like the all-pervasive mantra of positive thinking, which, when it comes to an objective assessment of a situation, tends to sugarcoat reality. The evolutionary advantage mentioned may well be short-lived after all.
wk

Another movie tip, this time in time :) Today's the release day of "End:Civ" on the web "for little or no money" (i.e. a donation).

It starts off in a quite alarming way (don't let that deter you), and the political message towards the end of the film may sound even more alarming to many - but after all it makes one think about the issues presented and the appropriate answers to them; whether we agree or not agree with the measures proposed. If we call these views "extremist", at least it prompts consideration if "extremist" is a fitting description for the motive of the movie, too.

If you only got 5 minutes, maybe watch minutes 44 to 49 about tarsand extraction; Or take the following quote from the movie: "In the next 40 to 50 years we are going to see the extinction of more species than we've seen in the last 65 million years."; Or browse through some of our previous blog posts - 1/28/2011 Extreme or 9/20/2009 Is insanity destroying this planet?.

Whatever you think after watching, I think this one is worth replacing your video subscription for one evening:

[video]

wk

As promised, more quoting. This time a section from Scott Russell Sanders' "A Conservationists Manifesto", which (the section) would also perfectly describe our little website:

"It's plain that Earth cannot support for much longer the extravagant way of life so common in rich countries, nor can it support the spreading of that extravagance to poor countries. Sooner or later we'll burn up all the cheap oil, we'll pump the aquifers dry, we'll cut down the last big trees, we'll fish the oceans bare, we'll plow up the last arable land, and taint the last clean air. The life of endless consumption is devastating to the planet and bound to fail. The question is not whether it will fail but when, and how the end of our spree will come - by careful preparation, or by catastrophe.
Knowing all this, how should a person act? We might shrug off the knowledge, pretend we can go on building vast houses, driving enormous cars, shopping around the clock, wiping out other species, fouling the atmosphere, polluting water, and squandering soil forever and ever. We might admit the gravity of our situation, while counting on scientists and engineers to come up with a technical fix. We might place our faith in the free market, believing it will somehow furnish a second, unspoiled earth for our use, once the price is right. We might concede that neither economics nor technology will enable us to pursue infinite growth on a finite globe, and so decide to live it up while we can, leaving future generations to figure out how to survive on a ransacked planet. Or we might seek to live more lightly, reducing our demands on Earth, devising or recovering simple, elegant, durable practices that could serve our descendants long after the current binge of consumption has withered away."

"Knowing all this, how should a person act?"

Wouldn't it be the most sensible step and even common sense to first of all cut back on consumption? Many countries these days debate on opting out of nuclear power, and struggle to find answers on how to make up for the energy. Windturbines? Coal and "carbon capture and storage"? Even more dams for hydropower? If we'd be honest we would acknowledge none of them are sustainable. But there is one energy source which is worth hundreds of nuclear power plants and is totally sustainable; it is available starting tomorrow if we want: reduce consumption. I believe (let me throw out a second totally unscientific number) that we could easily save 25% of our energy consumption, right now.

Take mobility for example. Today's fuel economy of new cars still hovers around an average of 21mpg - it would be easy and no significant inconvenience to buy new cars only which make 30mpg, or even 40mpg; plus not leaving the car idling on parking lots, in drive-throughs and for warming-up or cooling-down. If that's not enough, sharing a ride here and there and going by bike now and then should bring consumption down far beyond 25% (and with it the likelihood of oil "spills" and a whole lot of other issues).

But of course nobody dares to propose that.
The economy! And, of course: The elections!

Truth is, our economy, based on natural resources after all (read: today's economy, based on the exploitation of natural resources) will come to a halt anyway. And although some votes should not be the driving force for people who claim to "lead" us, we all are the reason they don't act. Sorry to say: only your share makes a difference.
wk