Why bees and pigs are not machines 12

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1. 

   amc89 Posted 6:32 am
   17 Dec 2007

   Great articleHopefully the factory farming of pigs in California will soon be prohibited. Visit http://www.humanecalifornia.org

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2. 

   Karen Lee Orr Posted 8:03 am
   17 Dec 2007

   "The Cornification of Food"A week and a half ago, Alternative Radio featured Michael Pollan.  He gave a 57 minute talk titled "The Cornification of Food".
   Here it is ~
   
   http://Curmudgeons-R.Us/cornification.mp3

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3. 

   Biodiversivist Posted 1:08 pm
   17 Dec 2007

   Yeah that was an iteresting articleWhat a mess.
   
   In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world

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4. 

   justlou Posted 10:50 pm
   17 Dec 2007

   SustainabilityLike Christianity, a truly radical concept, but rarely practiced in the true meaning of the words.  In truth, how many of us really want to attempt sustainability without a heavy overlay of technology and industry?  But if it entails living a radical lifestyle vs. our heavily technology and energy dependent lifestyles, we'll continue singing the praises in the pews while deluding ourselves with images of salvation and redemption. Sustainability can't be about getting it right for the next world but about getting it right in the here and now.  Earth writes the ultimate rules from which we cannot find exemption.  And unlike salvation, we or our descendents, will know the final answer in this life.  We left the garden of sustainable living --the wild earth.  How we return, how we humble ourselves in learning to live on earth, is the meaning of man and sustainability.  

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5. 

   caniscandida Posted 11:20 pm
   17 Dec 2007

   the rectification of namesYes, Confucius had it right, one of the world's greatest religious thinkers, and arguably the most influential, in terms of numbers of people living in Confucian societies.
   And so Pollan should not stop with "sustainability" and its opposite.  He pretty much makes the further point, but should make it explicit: We need to rectify the name "animal," and such names of animals as "pig" and "bee."  Of course they are not machines.  But how long will it take people to realize that?  The bee-box crowd still seem to be thinking of bee colonies as machines: once they find the cause of Colony Collapse Disorder, they can get rid of it, the bees will be OK again, and the machine can resume working normally.
   In connexion with the most recent "This week in ocean news," I noticed another case of animals-as-machines, the salmon raised in fish CAFOs.  They are infested with sea lice, which can kill the small salmon.  So, sure enough, the fish farmers are using something chemical to kill the sea lice, with little or no thought to the environmental effects of that agent.  Cf. Pollan's important sentence: "Raising vast numbers of pigs or chickens or cattle in close and filthy confinement simply would not be possible without the routine feeding of antibiotics to keep the animals from dying of infectious diseases."
   I wonder if we have a name for that kind of thinking, which reduces living beings to machines, or parts of machines, the running of which is intended to profit the reductionist.  That happens whenever a slave-owner, told that a slave of his has given birth, greets the news as but an item to be reported to his book-keeper.  It happened, during the Age of Exploration/Colonialism, whenever a European landed on some unknown shore in Hispaniola or Ghana or India, and met some of the people there, thinking only, "How can I make money out of this?"
   Are slavery and colonialism typical kinds of -- another name -- economic growth?  Does economic growth happen typically as a reaction to some original unsustainability?
   An ethical matter of a different kind is raised by the prospect (a distant one?) of abolishing the CAFO system.  That would be good news for animals, in the short run at least, even if it were done for reasons of human public health.  In that case, though, human beings ought not to be allowed to congratulate themselves as having done a fine thing, when in fact their motivation was self-serving and ignoble.
   Moreover, if the CAFO system is abolished for any reason other than that it is founded on the suffering of many billions of innocent sentient beings, then there is no guarantee that a meat-producing system that replaces CAFOs will not be even more inhumane, in one way or another.
   It is to be hoped that if the eating of animal flesh will be an important part of human culture long into the future, we can quickly get to the stage of cultivating tissue in laboratories, and not have to linger too awfully long in the creepy stage of real animals, with all their body parts, but genetically modified to be perceptionless.
   
   Chickens are our cousins! So are fish! So are other sentient animals! Let us learn to be kind.

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6. 

   Ron Steenblik Posted 11:43 pm
   17 Dec 2007

   In answer to Canis,who woneders:
   I wonder if we have a name for that kind of thinking, which reduces living beings to machines, or parts of machines, the running of which is intended to profit the reductionist[?]
   How about, "faunication"?

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7. 

   justlou Posted 12:01 am
   18 Dec 2007

   CanisAre we not all cogs in the machine?  Is man not the ultimate domesticate?  The machine has us and we are just taking more along for the productivity ride.  "Breakthrough" to most means more machine, more complexity, more ratcheting up the gizmos, and salvation via the next magical acronym.    

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8. 

   Martha Hagood Posted 4:33 am
   18 Dec 2007

   But what about wild bees?Thanks for "faunication," that's wonderful.
   
   But my question is, Are the free-range, non-boxed bees out there being affected by the hive disorders to the same extent? Or does anyone know? Has anyone tried to measure this?

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9. 

   Ron Steenblik Posted 5:23 am
   18 Dec 2007

   Answer to Martha's questionMy understanding is that there are few "free range" colonies of Apis mellifera (the European honeybee) left in the wild -- certainly not enough to make much of a difference. Bumblebees and solitary bees, to my knowledge, have been unaffected by the hive disorders that have plagued the honeybee.

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10. 

    caniscandida Posted 6:09 am
    18 Dec 2007

    the birds, the bees, and the machinesYes, Ron, "faunication" is very cute.  Many of us do indeed do a fair amount of faunicating when we are young, but usually, as we wise up some with age, we realize that faunication is unsustainable.
    Martha,
    
    that is a very interesting question, to which I also would like to know the answer.  There is a fair amount available on the decrease of numbers of native pollinators in North America, including bees specially adapted to certain flowers of particular regions, on account of competition from invasive European honeybees.  But what about those invasives?  Are they observed to be suffering Colony Collapse Disorder?  No doubt the "honeybee entomologist at the University of Minnesota" whom Pollan quotes, Marla Spivak, would know.
    JustLou,
    
    sure, it is possible to describe living beings and their ecosystems, including us human beings and our cultures, as kinds of mechanisms.  And I hope those Confucianists who preach "the rectification of names" are not so strict as to ban metaphors, and other kinds of imagery, from all public discourse.  But of course we need to be clear how far we can take those metaphors, and where they begin to be misleading.
    Can "life," "mind," "mentality," and "consciousness" appear simply within a certain array of unliving, inanimate, mindless molecules?  Or is it necessary to postulate a metaphysical level of reality in order to explain them?
    And if we answer "No" to that second question, can we still explain the origin of the ethical faculties, such as the sense of responsibility of one human being with regard to another, or to a non-human being?  Is the evolution of those faculties, along with the rest of the human mind, the result of a purely mechanistic process?  Are our fiercely fought disagreements over what is "good" and what is "bad" as much the result of random inheritances within a mechanistic system, and as little significant, as our varying preferences among ice cream flavors?
    Needless to say, these are questions to which responses that are totally satisfactory to everyone are not likely to be supplied any time soon.
    
    Chickens are our cousins! So are fish! So are other sentient animals! Let us learn to be kind.

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11. 

    Ron Steenblik Posted 6:17 am
    18 Dec 2007

    CanisThe European honeybee, the invasive species as you oberve, is precisely the species that is suffering from CCD. (By the way, my Dad has kept bees since he was 16 -- some 67 years now!)

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12. 

    caniscandida Posted 11:05 am
    18 Dec 2007

    home, home on the rangeWell there you are, Ron.  It is precisely those free-range European honeybees, i.e. "feral bees," escaped or released invasives, buzzing about here in North America, that Martha and I are thinking about.  I would have presumed that they are numerous.  But you know better, having honey in the blood, so to speak. : )
    E.g., Africanized bees are our most famous, or infamous, feral invasive bees, with plenty of colonies at this point in the US Southwest, not just painful but dangerous to stumble upon.  And yet they are honeybees, the European subspecies of Apis mellifera bred with the aggressive but more-honey-productive African subspecies.
    Another question is, how far and wide do bees naturally migrate?  Worker bees do not live through an active season of maybe a month and a half or so, I have learned.  But the queens and the drones live on.  Michael Pollan writes something a bit misleading, about how bees would not naturally remain in the vicinity of the almond groves, where the trees are in bloom for only three weeks: "For what bee would hang around an orchard where there's absolutely nothing to eat for the 49 weeks of the year when the almond trees aren't in bloom?"  But bees do not directly eat all the nectar that they collect from flowers; they bring it back to the colony, where it is regurgitated and made into the durable food that lasts during the non-flowery seasons, i.e. honey.
    
    Chickens are our cousins! So are fish! So are other sentient animals! Let us learn to be kind.

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