bottleman’s Recent Comments

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  low mileage and moms, all around

  Ok, yeah, SUV's suck.  But I wonder if they are primarily to blame for reduction in automobile gas efficiency.  In the past decade or two even the mileage of SEDANS and small cars has flattened: check out ads for sedans touting "25 mpg highway!" -- ridiculous considering what my Toyota pickup got in 1979, which was above 30. My guess is that engineering improvements are going into power. I'm sure someone has data on this.

  So why aren't SUV's the spray-on can of the 00's?  There's a powerful maternal pull towards SUV's, as a documentary on PBS demonstrated in a profile of hifalutin marketing researchers.  After a whole bunch of fancy metapsychoanalysis, they concluded: Make cars bigger and bulkier.  Women and moms will feel safer in them.  It's kind of like walking around with a big big dog.

  Which isn't to blame one sex or the other, just this: that instinct for protection, whether it's justified by safety data or not, can easily overrule altruism.  It's even more powerful than the urge to destroy underarm odor.

  bottleworld.netOn And why is it still around? posted 3 years, 1 month ago 10 Responses

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  it's good we're beating this out

  Firstoff I should say, man, am I spending way too much time on the internet, inspired by this discussion.

  Though I don't quite agree with all of Jason's points, I think it's really valuable that we're having such an intelligent discussion on the distance between the animal rights movement and the environmental one. I really felt like that distance was vast (see my earlier comments if you're curious) and just getting this stuff out in the open offers the promise of shortening it a bit.  It's like some dirty little secret your parents don't like to talk about.  What a relief to shout it out loud.  Next topic: teenage sex? On Enviros should adopt some animal welfare concerns posted 3 years, 1 month ago 31 Responses

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  wait, ARE there common goals?

  Man, this is a tough one, as the 40+ comments on the other thread shows.  Here's why (I'll try to keep it short).  

  Some years ago I did a magazine feature about another cosmic divide -- the one between hunters and environmentalists.  I was convinced that an alliance of "sportsmen" and city "enviros" could be a very powerful force since their goals for habitat protection could be aligned.  

  I discovered that (though there were jerks all around) there were some incredibly smart hunters who put my enviro-style ecological knowledge and care to shame.  That alliance can work and sometimes does.

  Along the way I found one of the biggest barriers to collaboration was the idea that some hunters had: that environmentalists and animal rights activists were the same thing.  It was very useful propaganda for the jerky hunters to lump all enviromentalists in with, say, PETA.

  Meanwhile the animal rights activists I spoke to didn't consider themselves environmentalists -- they considered themselves protectors of animals. Environmentalists might not object to eating meat, for example, or animals in product testing.

  There was something so solemn about that divide. The hunters and environmentalists liked to scream and make fun of each other's clothes, but at the end of the day they all like being out in the woods and most of them like drinking beer.

  I couldn't find such common ground between animal rights people and enviros. The bar set by animal rights people -- protecting every animal -- seemed so high and on some occasions quite contradictory to conservation goals.

  So other than a few outrages (CAFOs maybe), I don't see the two groups meeting soon.  Maybe someone has some more encouraging experiences?

  bottleworld.netOn The activists among us should remember that there's plenty to do together posted 3 years, 1 month ago 5 Responses

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  No, but..

  Nah, it's not frivolous.  There are just some animals out there -- they're usually big or mean or wiley -- that are icons of age and "otherness." They remind us humans that there's a whole world out there that really has nothing to do with us, and we're just visiting it.  Besides whales, there are things like dolphins, wolves, and grizzly bears.

  It's important to help those species thrive because they remind us of all that.  Everybody needs relief from the realm of human society at some point, and even just seeing a whale or a grizzly can do that.

  At the same time, in terms of strict conservation, I do get worried about focusing efforts on the most charismatic species or populations... the biggest of the big, the cutest of the cute, the bluest of the blue.

  An animal's attractive body shouldn't be the basis for our valuation of its existence.  That kind of judgment helps us ignore reality and morality.  It's like having no qualms about eating Cow 2582 but acting shocked when it's time to harvest Old Bess.

  There are a lot of animals (and ecosystems) out there that have no outstanding attractive qualities to our aesthetics (hmm, mosquitos come to mind).  But they're alive, they're the end tendril of a billion years of evolution just like us, and they deserve a vote in the grand old American-Idol-species-off.

  bottleworld.netOn A response to a plan to dramatically increase the scope of whaling posted 3 years, 2 months ago 30 Responses

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  genetic meddling is fun

  Congrats to your daughter!  Fair time is fun time for more reasons than just the deep fried twinkies.

  Sorry to get serious here -- but you spoke of technology.  Visiting the animal barns makes my thoughts turn to animal breeding and how queesy it might make some erstwhile greens.  Usually the fair comes with the idealized picture of the family farm -- people living with nature as partners rather than masters.

  But think about it. All those super breeds that we love to see at fairs -- the maddeningly lactoproductive microgoats, the adorable long-eared lops, the awe-inspiring draft horses -- aren't they really the product of long term genetic meddling by the human race, as breeders again and again crossed individuals with desired characteristics?  Haven't we created our own forks in the evolutionary tree?

  It's not quite genetic engineering, since the crosses are between closely related lines, not ones that diverged a billion years ago.  But it's still got the same theme: humans directing the rest of life in a very intentional way.

  I don't think there's anything wrong with that.  I love the lops! But once you acknowledge the merit in humanity's long history of breeding animals, genetic engineering stops looking like a dungeon of horrors and more like a potentially useful tool.  I'm thinking about its possibilities more and more.

  http://bottleworld.netOn Biodiversivist posted 3 years, 2 months ago 6 Responses