Shunya's Notes

Flesh of Your Flesh

Should you eat meat? Here is a really good essay by Elizabeth Kolbert that also reviews Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals.

Americans love animals. Forty-six million families in the United States own at least one dog, and thirty-eight million keep cats. Thirteen million maintain freshwater aquariums in which swim a total of more than a hundred and seventy million fish. Collectively, these creatures cost Americans some forty billion dollars annually ... “We have so many customers who say they’d eat macaroni and cheese before they’d cut back on their dogs,” a Colorado pet-store owner recently told the Denver Post. In a survey released this past August, more than half of all dog, cat, and bird owners reported having bought presents for their animals during the previous twelve months, often for no special occasion, just out of love. (Fish enthusiasts may bring home fewer gifts, but they spend more on each one, with the average fish gift coming to thirty-seven dollars.) A majority of owners report that one of the reasons they enjoy keeping pets is that they consider them part of the family.

Americans also love to eat animals. This year, they will cook roughly twenty-seven billion pounds of beef, sliced from some thirty-five million cows. Additionally, they will consume roughly twenty-three billion pounds of pork, or the bodies of more than a hundred and fifteen million pigs, and thirty-eight billion pounds of poultry, some nine billion birds. Most of these creatures have been raised under conditions that are, as Americans know—or, at least, by this point have no excuse not to know—barbaric. Broiler chickens, also known, depending on size, as fryers or roasters, typically spend their lives in windowless sheds, packed in with upward of thirty thousand other birds and generations of accumulated waste. The ammonia fumes thrown off by their rotting excrement lead to breast blisters, leg sores, and respiratory disease. Bred to produce the maximum amount of meat in the minimum amount of time, fryers often become so top-heavy that they can’t support their own weight. At slaughtering time, they are shackled by their feet, hung from a conveyor belt, and dipped into an electrified bath known as “the stunner.”...

How is it that Americans, so solicitous of the animals they keep as pets, are so indifferent toward the ones they cook for dinner?

More here.  (via 3QD. Also check out my previous posts on this topic here, here, and here.)

The Dark Side of Dubai

British journalist Johann Hari goes to the desert kingdom and finds a sea of disturbing stories:

There are three different Dubais, all swirling around each other. There are the expats...; there are the Emiratis, headed by Sheikh Mohammed; and then there is the foreign underclass who built the city, and are trapped here. They are hidden in plain view. You see them everywhere, in dirt-caked blue uniforms, being shouted at by their superiors, like a chain gang – but you are trained not to look. It is like a mantra: the Sheikh built the city. The Sheikh built the city. Workers? What workers?

Every evening, the hundreds of thousands of young men who build Dubai are bussed from their sites to a vast concrete wasteland an hour out of town, where they are quarantined away. Until a few years ago they were shuttled back and forth on cattle trucks, but the expats complained this was unsightly, so now they are shunted on small metal buses that function like greenhouses in the desert heat. They sweat like sponges being slowly wrung out.

Sonapur is a rubble-strewn patchwork of miles and miles of identical concrete buildings. Some 300,000 men live piled up here, in a place whose name in Hindi means "City of Gold". In the first camp I stop at – riven with the smell of sewage and sweat – the men huddle around, eager to tell someone, anyone, what is happening to them.

More here (and some videos: one, two, three). For this article, Hari was banned from Dubai and his writing blocked from access there.

On Being Exiled from Nature

The vast majority of readers of this blog do not live in close proximity to nature but in urbanscapes of steel and concrete, as I do as well. Sure, now and then we go out camping or hike on a forest trail, but isn't that as far as we go? Perhaps we go out because, as Thoreau said, "We need the tonic of wildness—to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe, to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest." Or perhaps deep down we feel, as John Muir did, that going out is really going in.

Our distant human ancestors lived in intimate contact with plants and animals, but in recent millennia, technologically advancing societies have been erecting barriers between us and nature, hoping to be shielded from its harshness, dangers, and unpredictability. Who among us would wholly dismiss that urge? By any yardstick, this process—which accelerated with the industrial revolution—has come a long way, and it would hardly be an exaggeration to say that a hallmark of our modernity is a near total loss of first-hand biological knowledge and personal experience of nature's beats and rhythms. Our "objective" classroom knowledge now tends to be bookish, theoretical, and detached.

Childhood development was once shaped by the direct experience of plants and animals, their cycle and drama of birth, decay, and death, with folkbiology furnishing the taxonomy, teleology, and the interrelationships of the living world, including the attitude and knowledge needed for survival in a given ecological zone. A great many children now develop amidst apartment blocks, public parks, and city streets, where the context of local ecology, its delicate dependencies, and the sense of its inherent limits is less visible than ever before.

What implication does this have for human cognition, as in how we learn about and relate to the world? Don't we already get socialized into a culture that regards nature as an abstract realm detached from daily life, a kind of pleasure zone we can visit on vacation? Or nature as a mere resource, amenable to manipulation and cost-benefit analysis done from the comfort of our concrete jungles? Yet, understandable as this is, big questions remain: do we know the full cost of this cognitive shift, its weaknesses and blind spots? What's at stake if we don't?

Nick Enfield touches on some of these topics in his review of "The Native Mind and the Cultural Construction of Nature" by Scott Atran and Douglas Medin, an alluring interdisciplinary work in anthropology and psychology:

Why is the biological knowledge of traditional societies so remarkable to an educated westerner? The literature is littered with awestruck descriptions of the fieldworker's sense of wonder at what villagers know. Ask a traditional cultivator to name as many tree species as he can, and the list will go on and on and on, literally into the hundreds. And it is more than a mere list of names: he will also have a rich body of knowledge about the functions of different trees, and their ecological interrelations with other plants and animals. One might wonder how they do it, but the real question is: How is it that we can't do it? The average educated westerner knows as much about nature as a Hanunóo tribesman is likely to know about computer software. Atran and Medin's book opens with this unsettling fact. When the authors ask their US university students to name all the trees they know, these young people are at a loss. Here is the response of a Northwestern Honours student: Oak, pine, spruce, ... cherry ... (giggle) evergreen,... Christmas tree, is that a kind of tree? ... God what's the average here? Needless to say, it is not merely an inability to name the trees, but also to say anything sensible about their functions or ecological roles. Compare this to the richly annotated lists of up to 500 species readily elicited from members of the least technologically advanced and least formally educated small-scale traditional cultivator societies.

To get a sense of how and when this poverty of understanding among modern literates has come about, Atran and Medin delve into recent history of the English language. Tracing historical references to trees in the OED, they find that ‘writing about trees is less extensive now than in any other time in the history of the English language'. Their matter-of-fact conclusion about the world of English speakers is a headline with a disturbing ring to it: ‘Cultural support for trees has declined'. The authors show that since the industrial revolution, Anglo intuitions for nature have devolved. Is it a problem? One response is that it simply reflects the lack of relevance of trees in daily life. We understandably don't know much about what we don't need. But perhaps the problem is not that we lack this knowledge, it is that we think we don't need it. Biological illiteracy is more alarming than illiteracy itself. Knowledge of nature is not specific to an invented environment like that of books or cyberspace. While only some of us invented writing and computer programs, none of us invented nature. Nature invented us. And nature will be the agent of our eventual collapse. As the biologist Jared Diamond describes it in his book of that title, a key cause of collapse is lack of awareness that there is a problem at all.

More here.

No Longer Golden

Paul Harris on the dire straits of California:

California has a special place in the American psyche. It is the Golden State: a playground of the rich and famous with perfect weather. It symbolises a lifestyle of sunshine, swimming pools and the Hollywood dream factory.

But the state that was once held up as the epitome of the boundless opportunities of America has collapsed. From its politics to its economy to its environment and way of life, California is like a patient on life support. At the start of summer the state government was so deeply in debt that it began to issue IOUs instead of wages. Its unemployment rate has soared to more than 12%, the highest figure in 70 years. Desperate to pay off a crippling budget deficit, California is slashing spending in education and healthcare, laying off vast numbers of workers and forcing others to take unpaid leave. In a state made up of sprawling suburbs the collapse of the housing bubble has impoverished millions and kicked tens of thousands of families out of their homes. Its political system is locked in paralysis and the two-term rule of former movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger is seen as a disaster – his approval ratings having sunk to levels that would make George W Bush blush. The crisis is so deep that Professor Kevin Starr, who has written an acclaimed history of the state, recently declared: "California is on the verge of becoming the first failed state in America."

More here.

Champion of the Green Revolution Dies at 95

Who has heard of Norman Borlaug? I had not heard of him until now, after his death, when the Wall Street Journal calls him "arguably the greatest American of the 20th century".

Borlaug's life work, the Green Revolution, is the reason the world is not starving today as it was half a century ago. As the individual responsible for spreading high-yield agricultural practices through the hungriest parts of the world, beginning with South Asia in the 1960s, he was honored with the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 and the Padma Vibhushan in 2006. He changed the world, as much as did Louis Pasteur or the Wright Brothers, yet his name is commonly unknown outside the Developing World. And his contribution is today seen as controversial.

He is eulogized today in the Wall Street Journal:

Born in 1914 in rural Cresco, Iowa, where he was educated in a one-room schoolhouse, Borlaug won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his work ending the India-Pakistan food shortage of the mid-1960s. He spent most of his life in impoverished nations, patiently teaching poor farmers in India, Mexico, South America, Africa and elsewhere the Green Revolution agricultural techniques that have prevented the global famines widely predicted when the world population began to skyrocket following World War II.
....

After his triumph in India and Pakistan and his Nobel Peace Prize, Borlaug turned to raising crop yields in other poor nations especially in Africa, the one place in the world where population is rising faster than farm production and the last outpost of subsistence agriculture. At that point, Borlaug became the target of critics who denounced him because Green Revolution farming requires some pesticide and lots of fertilizer. Trendy environmentalism was catching on, and affluent environmentalists began to say it was "inappropriate" for Africans to have tractors or use modern farming techniques. Borlaug told me a decade ago that most Western environmentalists "have never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for 50 years, they'd be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists in wealthy nations were trying to deny them these things."

Plastic, Plastic Everywhere

For the first time ever, scientists have embarked on a study of the Plastic Vortex, also called the Pacific Garbage Patch, a gargantuan collection of plastic trash that has collected in the North Pacific Ocean. The garbage patch floats on and near the surface of the ocean in the North Pacific Gyre; it is currently believed to be about twice the size of Texas.

About a month ago, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California-San Diego and the nonprofit Ocean Voyages Institute sent two research vessels, The New Horizon and the Kaisei, to meet at the gyre and study its composition, dimensions, and impact. The ships have just safely returned from their journey, and the first details of their findings are trickling out. The San Jose Mercury News reports:

Scientists who returned to the Bay Area this week after an expedition to the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" brought piles of plastic debris they pulled out of the ocean — soda bottles, cracked patio chairs, Styrofoam chunks, old toys, discarded fishing floats and tangled nets.

But what alarmed them most, they said Tuesday, was the nearly inconceivable amount of tiny, confettilike pieces of broken plastic. They took hundreds of water samples between the Farallon Islands near San Francisco and the notorious garbage patch 1,000 miles west of California, and every one had tiny bits of plastic floating in it. And the closer they sailed to the garbage patch, which some researchers have estimated to be twice the size of Texas, the more plastic pieces per gallon they found.

This short video (2:45) sums up the mission and their preliminary findings:

If you're interested to learn more about Project Kaisei, you might start with the websites Project Kaisei, SEAPLEX, and Marine Debris.

The Tiger of Jelepara

The amazing Sunderbans, land of superlatives, is where the Ganga River meets the Indian Ocean, a great expanse of flat, mangrove covered islands, and estuaries that change salinity with the tides. Both the world's largest river delta and largest estuarine mangrove forest, it's also home to the world's largest population of Royal Bengal tigers as well as some of the world's largest crocodiles, which can get to be over 20 ft. long, with the girth of two grown men. Every year villagers are killed by the local wildlife. Three years ago, we took a boat ride through the uninhabited regions of the wildlife sanctuary. Since the islands are heavily forested and we were confined either to the boat or to fenced-in walkways on a couple of the islands, we did not see much of the unique wildlife (except baby crocs at a breeding station). No doubt, the water, too, teems with life, including elusive pods of rare freshwater dolphins, but it's too full of silt to see anything at all. The Sunderbans felt wild to me, and mysterious, a place where a thousand eyes peer at us, unsentimentally, though we are blithely unaware.

Here's a recent article on the increasing conflicts between tigers and humans in the Sunderbans. It's a story with a tragic ending, from every point of view, but it brings together several strands of complexity on questions of how people co-exist with nature (or don't), and might have done throughout human history. The people in this article live by forest subsistence in tiger territory, much as people would have throughout southern Asia for perhaps the last 60,000 years, until the tigers (and lions, and forests) were mostly killed off, in just the last hundred years. John Vidal, of the Guardian, vividly recounts the story of one tiger:

Tarak was walking along the high earth embankment that protects Jelepara from the river Chunkuri, and had just passed a small Hindu temple with its gaudy, painted wooden effigies of the tiger god Dakshin Ray. He would not have seen the real tiger that had just swum across the river from the great Sunderbans forest 400 yards away. It hauled itself out of the water and mauled him from behind. No one even heard Tarak cry out.... But that was just the start of the drama in Jelepara that night....

Now it was the animal's turn to run. First dozens of men tried to corner it, blocking off its escape routes and chasing it away from the village. The tiger was tracked through long grass and rice fields. Finally it leapt on the roof of a house. Film shot on a mobile phone by a villager shows the tiger looking perfectly relaxed.

You can see that video here—it's poor quality and grim, but worth a look. Read the full story, loaded with interesting information (via Asian Window).

Lohmann on Carbon Trading

Larry Lohmann, author and founding member of the Durban Group for Climate Justice, explains how carbon trading works, why it is an ill-conceived response to Climate Change, and why Bush and Gore are not as far apart in their policy prescriptions as some of us believe.

Further reading:

• Al Gore's climate solution - David Morris, Alternet
• 'Obscenity' of Carbon Trading - Kevin Smith, BBC News
• The Carbon Folly - Emily Flynn Vencat, Newsweek
• Smoke Alarm: EU Shows Carbon Trading is Not Cutting Emissions, Guardian
• Carbon Trade Watch Website - various articles
• Emissions Trading - Wikipedia article, with additional links at the bottom

On Nuclear Energy

A compelling presentation on why nuclear energy must be a significant part of a clean energy solution (Gwyneth Cravens and Rip Anderson). What's needed next is a slick production -- "An Inconvenient Truth, Part II" -- to tie it all together using more charismatic presenters.

The Last Empire

August afternoons in Shanghai, ambling down Nanjing Road with posh boutiques blasting chilled air through open doors into the sultry street, one might imagine that energy is free in China. At less than 5c per KWH, it is certainly cheap (10c in India and the US). But the real costs are hidden, though, increasingly, not very well. Most visitors to China are struck by its urban air pollution. A pall of sulphrous smoke hangs over towns and cities and even wafts through the countryside into neighboring countries. One new coal-fired power plant opens each week. Respiratory illnesses are common. In 2006, China surpassed the US to become the leading producer of green house emissions in the world.

This is not breaking news. Much has been written about China's environmental crisis in recent years: vanishing forests, encroaching desert, depleting ground water, acid rain, toxic chemicals in polluted rivers, etc. China has clearly prioritized economic growth over environmental health. But a part of the problem is inherent in the drivers of its economic growth -- China has become the industrial heartland of the world. The developed countries have, in effect, shifted their factories and pollution to China (this is one outsourcing no politician in the US complains about). As a result, as consumers, all of us are now a party to China's environmental crisis. Each time we buy a plastic toy, a blender, or an iPod, we send a puff of sulphrous smoke into China's air. And some of it is coming back to haunt us in our own backyards!

A decent survey of China's environmental malaise by Jacques Leslie recently appeared in Mother Jones: