Comments Robert Delfs has made

That's not enough

We would also need another Republican to use inside information about the bulb purchase to make money speculating in CFL lamp shares; a former WSJ oped idologue-turned-spokesperson for the Dept of Energy to blame the fact that the old bulb burned out on the lax moral standards of the Clinton administration.  

Robert Delfs

Talking 'bout a revolution

It's a long way from where I live to the closest news stand that carries copies of Harpers, so I appreciate your willingness to risk CTS to retail more of the recent piece by Garret Keizer.  "Writer and former minister" might be the more correct tag.  

I hope Harpers will eventually see fit to post this.  In the meantime, I'd like to respond to the extended quotes you provided.  While I very much enjoy Keizer's insights into the often treacherous interplay of environmentalism and class politics, one wonders where he is going with this.  

It's easy be scathing about Middlebury students decked in green sweat shirts driving cars their daddies bought them to Sheffield to lecture small town working class people on their environmental responsibilities.  Does the fact that children are drowning in our inner city schools mean that nobody should worry about polar bears or climate change until we've brought injustice to an end?  Does the fact that some people will make money through trading carbon offsets (they already are) or that some corporations will be able to reduce overall costs render the whole approach invalid or immoral?  (Keizer, comparing carbon offsets to selling "lynching offsets" to the Ku Klux Klan, clearly thinks so.

The closing Keizer quote in your posting...

To put that as succinctly as possible, the days of paradise for a few are drawing to a close. The game of finding someone else in some convenient misery to fight our wards, pull our rickshaws, and serve as the offset for our every filthy indulgence is just about up. It is either Earth for all of us or hell for most of us.

... reads as an ultimatum, presumably intentionally, but betrays a dangerous illusion.  Keizer isn't the only person who imagines that where Marx, Mao, and liberation theology have all failed, climate change might yet deliver us into a post-capitalist world, a class free kingdom of Heaven on Earth.

Keizer's position is not unrelated to the views of transformational environmentalists such as Curtis White, who believes..

"Even when we are trying to aid the environment, we are not willing as individuals to leave the system that we know in our heart of hearts is the cause of our problems. We are even further from knowing how to take the collective risk of leaving this system entirely and ordering our societies differently. We are not ready. Not yet, at least."

Sadly, Keizer's apocalyptic vision of a post-global warming era that will be "hell for most of us" may be correct. If we imagine for a moment that future history turns out closer to the more pessimistic projections, such as James Lovelock's vision of a new Dark Age beginning in the mid-21st Century as isolated bands of "hot arid world survivors" struggle to reach the last surviving Arctic centres of civilization - it is certain that some who now count themselves among the wealthy and privileged will share in the suffering of the masses. For example, those who mistime their conversion of California beachfront real estate and S&P Index funds into well-stocked, bunkers in Colorado and Idaho, for example.  

If it ever came to that, I wouldn't be surprised if Bill Gates and his heirs have a very good of making it to Greenland and finding people to help htem defend their new estates against all comers,  at least a better chance than I and mine.  When the Keizer's Neo_Christian ChildrenChildren's Crusade launches its first attack across the tundra against Gates' New Seattle mercenary forces in the name of the New World Order, I'm afraid I wouldn't even consider betting against Microsoft.

Robert Delfs

There's are good reasons...

...that I couldn't continue working in China, or living in Hong Kong, anymore.  Waking up every morning with a hacking cough and tearing eyes was probably the biggest.  

On one of my last working trips to Beijing, it started raining mud, something I'd seen in China a couple of times before, but not that bad. You couldn't see out an autoobile's front window - the windshield wipers just smeared the mud, and after you got out of the car, in seconds you covered in this awful black... well, shit. It was like being on the set of a low-budget, badly-plotted film about a future  catastrophic ecological disaster, except that it was real, and already happening.

My candidate for the damn awful worst most polluted place on the planet prize would go to Lanzhou, in Gansu Provice (east of Shanxi, where Linfen is).  Trust me, yo don't want to go there.

Robert Delfs

Couldn't resist this...

Dan Letterman, on his show last night..

"On Saturday ... Al Gore will be 59 years old. He'll have a cake with 59 candles. 59 candles? Well, hell, there's your global warming right there."

Robert Delfs

Thetans for-and-against global warming

Thank Xenu that an environmental journalist is finally exhibiting the courage to take on the real important issues faced by our society today - namely celebrities with denial issues! Particularly celebrities who believe they are reincarnated immortals trying to deal with psychological traumas inflicted on their previous incarnations by extra-terrestrial dictators trillions of years ago.  (But that does explain a lot about Saturday Night Fever.)

Who is Frank Rich anyway?  What's important is whether Paris Hilton thinks that the "Fredo" Gonzales mess is about to implode all over the Bush Administration like a rotten habanero chile. Since Britney's out of rehab again, can we find out whether she thinks bioethanol fuel is for real or just another scam?  Inquiring minds want to know.

Now that I realize that Rosie O'Donnell really supports the Iranian mullahs, I've decided to give up being a liberal and support our heroic president, our sharp-shooting vice president, and the ineffable Karl Rove with every fibre of my being.

Is the phogo of Travolta's estate with the planes and the runways for real?  Didn't L. Ron say that Xenu transported his victims to earth in inter-stellar space planes that happened to look just like DC-8s built in Long Beach, California in the 1960s?  Could one of JT's planes actually be....??  Is Karl Rove really an Operating Thetan?

Robert Delfs

Elegiac

That was a lovely post. If your current town drunk decides to exercise his American mobility rights and move on to greener pastures, can I apply for his job?

Robert Delfs

Daddy never sleeps at night...

You really expected to find "ice bergs of CRISCO" in your septic tank, Richard? That may be a bit too much information...

My real question is why Umbra never explained the title quote from the Who.  Could this have been a punning allusion to something like the squeeze machine(or "Hug box", or the "Hug Chair") systems developed by Temple Grandin? If so, then Umbra would seem to be alluding to auto-eroticism as yet another bedroom strategy for avoiding the risk of adding to the world's population, in addition to the three that she mentions. I guess there's no doubt that it works.   (Note to DR: this has nothing to do with Ferraris. Or Hummers.)
On Umbra on greening your sex life posted 2 years, 8 months ago 12 Responses

I'm glad to hear there was more..

][JS wrote] ... because it was the first in my experience to really ask us to understand the devastation of the oceans not in a straight-forward analytical/quantitative way but in a more emotional and philosophical way- I'm also kind of a sucker for National Geographic- but the links take you to video they have also, which is really good- a whole documentary on the same topic.

I don't have the bandwidth here in Bali to handle internet video, so I never saw the linked documentary, just the article that was titled "Still Waters - the Global Fish Crisis" but was mostly about Mediterranean tuna. I'd been pointed to the piece last week by a friend posting on the conservation forum at wetpixel.com, a diving-underwater-photography related site I participate in, but just reading the article, I couldn't figure out what all the excitement was about.

Although I'm a fan of NatGeo from way back too, nowadays I often find myself disappointed by the lack of substance in the printed articles, though the photos are better than ever. I know there have been changes in editorial personnel and policy at NatGeo, like a lot of other publications.  Everything changes, I guess.  

Robert Delfs

Am I missing something?

Jason,

I couldn't agree with you more about the need to eliminate fishing subsidies, significantly reduce overall catches, and - as you say - change our way of thinking about the oceans. But I was confused when I clicked to the "amazing" NatGeo article, just as I had been when I first read this piece. Is something wrong with my browser? Am I only seeing the first part of a much longer article?

The article I read was a well-written feature story about the plight of the Atlantic and Mediterranean bluefin tuna. That is certainly a tragedy, but hardly an unknown one. There doesn't seem to be much about the global fishing crisis that the NatGeo article is supposedly about, nor what to do about it - how to save the oceans. The separate map contains the only information ostensibly relating to the larger picture, but confusingly presented and seemingly inconsistent with the data in the graphic by Ransom Myers of Dalhousie University   (Thanks, ekillian!)

There is quite a bit of solid information about the larger dimensions of the truly global fishing crisis out there, though it doesn't lend itself to NatGeo's recent approach to printed CNN-style video reports feature stories. The most recent (and widely reported) major study is probably the one by Brian Worm (also of Dalhousie University) and 13 other marine scientists, projected that populations of commercial fish and seafood species are likely to crash by 2048.  (See Impacts of Biodiversity Loss on Ocean Ecosystem Services in Science 3 Nov 2006, or the excellent summary of that study by Cornelia Dean in the New York Times (2 Nov 2006).

Caniscandida, you are certainly correct in saying that wild capture fishing is hunting, and it seems likely that most if not all wild capture fisheries will  disappear within many of our lifetimes. In the happy event that doesn't happen, I very much doubt that the cause will be mass voluntary cessation of fish eating by humans. As the Worm et al. study stated, the collapse of fish populations and other oceanic ecological services were still "largely reversible".  For that to happen would take a worldwide revolution in fisheries management, changes that may be unlikely, but wouldn't require the all world's population to convert to full-out vegetarianism, though I appreciate that there are people here deeply committed to that objective for other, non-conservation related motives.

Another interesting piece that apparently wasn't reported here at Grist when it first appeared, and which does address some interesting larger issues relating to the global fishing crisis is Natasha Loder's article "Point of no return" in Conservation (formerly Conservation in Practice) Vol 6 No 3 (July-Sept 2005).

Loder, a correspondent for The Economist, highlights recent studies about the way fishing, even when it does not lead to local extinction, has become a mechanism for inducing human-caused evolutionary changes in fish species, and the implications for fisheries management.

Robert Delfs

If you can't take a joke..

Um, I can see the idea that your car's "new car" fumes is killing you may not be that funny to you.  

Robert Delfs

Laissez les bonnes temps roulez!

Excellent points about the evils of advertising, y'all.  But here's a thought.  Let's focus on immediate environmental threats to the planet for awhile. Once that's taken care of, we can shift our attention to ending the twin scourges of capitalism and global imperialism.

Also sexism, racism, age-ism,  itchy synthetic fabrics, Velveeta cheese, "Danke shoen and Why, why, why?  Delilah?" (anything relating to Wayne Newton or Tom Jones, actually), terrorism, and terroir-ism (sidewise or otherwise - "Que Syrah syrah").

We're all deeply saddened that Gristmill is selling out to "feel good" environmentalism, of course. Hybrid SUVs. Forcing coal mine owners to offer an organic vegetarian lunch alternative to their employees. Making Al Gore iron his own shirts and bicycle all the way from his mansion to the private jet terminal in Nashville.

But, hey! Could it have been me who jumped on someone for praising college kids who were selling t-shirts and coffee mugs with "green" messages on them. Well, I was wrong. Deeply, terribly wrong.  And I'm sorry.

P.S.  I was surprised to see what David Roberts looks like, too.  I somehow thought he would be, well, older.

P.P.S.  Are Chip Giller's boots made from leather???

Robert Delfs

Soylent Green

Is there still enough sugar (or other mood-altering slash capacity-reducing substances in in the organic or gourmet versions of the twinkie so that one could use the fact of having eaten one as the basis for a legal defense in a homicide case.  

(Yeah, yeah, I know, that was all a myth, Dan White was really high on Ding Dongs or HoHos or something, de yada yada.  When people talk about outrageous miscarriages of justice, how come it's always about OJ Simpson, never about Dan White?)  

Robert Delfs

From the sublime to....

Federer is the greatest player of a generation.  Or perhaps more than that.  I hadn't seen this shot before - it's unbelievable.  The only explanation I can come with is that, when Federer was 12, the devil approached him, carrying a tennis racket, and Roger sold his soul.

The Tommy Seebach/Danish hippies Apache video is simply surreal.  You could imagine there could have been something that gave disco and kitsch a bad name. But a good thing to have around on the remote chance that there was ever a risk of becoming nostalgic about the 1970s.  Talk about one f**cked up decade.  

Robert Delfs

Now that's a serious belt buckle

If Hijo del Santo is really planning to battle the "enemies of the sea" threatening whales and sea turtles, then I'm all for him, belt buckle and all!

I'd like to get a wetsuit made up to look like a Lucha Libre costume.  Very nice!  

Robert Delfs

The trouble with Neo-Cons

Gee, Jason, wasn't it just last July that you and I spent a week together on a luxury live-aboard dive boat crusing around Komodo National Park in Indonesia with some friends, 12 other very privileged people?  I don't think either of us can make much of a case that was an "essential" trip, can we?

The main engine of The Seven Seas boat burns 50 L/hr, or 3.2 gals/hr - not bad for a 33 meter (108 foot) 250-tonne Phinisi schooner. Plus the outboards on the tenders, and the generators (which are on all the time).  As the main engine was probably only running 8 hours a day in Komodo, let's call it a round 3000 L (800 gal) of fuel for our week-long diving adventure. Not counting our flights from Bali to Labuanbajo and back.  We won't even consider the fuel your 747 burned getting you from the US to Bali, Indonesia in the first place.  And back.

A Learjet consumes about 500 L/hr cruising, so the fuel we used on our dive trip could have covered about 7.5 hours flying time had we been riding with Al Gore on one of his friend's planes - enough for a comfortable coast-to-coast plus maybe a quick run up to British Columbia for some fly fishing and back, eh?  Oh right, you don't eat fish.  Let's make it a run to Hawaii, then.  

Am I condemning you for your energy profligate ways, Jason?  Hardly.  I was on the boat too, nor was that my only dive trip last year.  But I've already confessed to my hypocrisy once in this thread. And I do make a tiny bit of a living at this.

I guess that's the trouble with Neo Cons generally.  It's not really about the truth, or solving the problem, but just finding angles to smear people you think are liberals. (cf. Newt Gingrich, and so many others.) Yes, I know, you were "just raising questions." Personally, I still think your "Dirty Al" post was dirty pool, but surely anyone whose signature in this forum identifies them as "teaching environmental economics" should be fair game.  Unless, that is, you think personal lifestyle choices are not relevant.

Robert Delfs

Update

Wires and newspapers today are saying that the EU summit concluded with a compromise on renewables, but the reports I've seen are inconsistent and I still haven't been able to find the actual text of the final statement online.

The Interpress News report said that the summit adopted a target of generating 20% of total primary energy from renewables by 2020.

Everyone also seems to agree this won't be enough to make a real difference in global warming.  In January, the EU Commission issued a paper warning that global emissions of greenhouse gases must be reduced by at least 50% in order to hold average global warming to 2 degrees C, implying cuts of 60-80% by 2050 in emissions by Europe and other industrialized nations, the IPS report said.

The EU apparently offered to deepen the 2020 target to 30% "provided that other developed countries (commit themselves to comparable emission targets."  That presumably means the US, so this would seem to be a fairly meaningless offer.

There are also apparently special "differentiated national overall targets" for some new EU members such as Poland and the Czech Republic which are heavily dependent on coal and heavy industry.  And implications for the future role of nuclear power under the pact remain unclear.

Muddy or not, this still could be more important than green t-shirts. Once the dust clears, I hope someone who understands the situation with respect to energy and carbon emissions in Europebetter than I do will weigh in with a serious analysis of what this all means.  

Robert Delfs

Perspective

Bill Maher had this to say about the Gore baiting...

"They're going after Al Gore, and he's not even in the race yet. ... They bust him because ... his house in Tennessee uses 20 times more electricity than the average house in Tennessee. But that's just because Gore's house has electricity"

Robert Delfs

Green engineer is correct...

Except that if they rely solely on roundup, the weeds develop a resistance, and you wind up using much larger quantities. The tilling breaks that resistance cycle by destroying weeds mechanically, regardless of their level of resistance.

Glyphosate resistant weeds have appeared in the US, Australia and elsewhere. Resistance is a serious problem, but it has not been established that "round-up ready" crops are responsible.  

In case anybody is confused about this, the glyphosate is <bold>not</bold> carried in the genetically modified round-up ready plant - it is applied directly to the field. Most glyphosate applications do not involve genetically modified crops.  Mainly because of its extraordinary safety and short persistance, glyphosate is the most widely used herbicide in the world.  It has been in extensive use for over 30 years.

As with any useful herbicide or pesticide, it is important that farmers understand the proper means of glyphosate delivery and application. As GreenEngineer points out, this means not relying solely on round-up, maintaining stands of untreated weeds and wild plants that are protected from exposure to glyphosate, and occasionally alternating glyphosate applications with tillage and/or other herbicides to avoid build-up of resistant strains.

Robert Delfs

3:00 am, walking home after a late night party...

Mihan described the recipe for Peanut noodles as being from "nowhere in particular", but it reads to me like a well-tamed version of the Sichuan/Szechwan (and subsequently Taipei) street vendors' classic quick meal for late night diners, Dandan mian. I don't mean the watery mess that appears on the menus of some Chinese restaurants in the US.  Real Dandan mian may be the original pre-corporate fast food - scrumptious, addictive, restorative, and capable of stopping a prospective hangover in its tracks before it even begins.

Kick up the fresh garlic and ginger a bit, use some sesame paste (or tahini) and sesame oil, make sure it's quality peanut butter (or, better yet, finely chop roasted peanuts yourself) add some hot chile sauce, and you've got it. The original street vendors' version also uses a few TBL of broth (but no meat) from hongshao niurou, a stew of water buffalo haunch cooked with garlic, chilis, and hot bean paste (doubanjiang), but this veggie version will be fine.

Robert Delfs

Yo soy un hombre sincero (in a Larry David voice)

David,

First off, dumping soy sauce over food is wrong and vulgar in any Chinese cuisine. And never put soy sauce on rice.  Never, ever.

Soy sauce should be used sparingly in the kitchen,  as a vehicle for salt and MSG (see below). One of the few occasions in Chinese cuisine when soy (along with vinegar, chile pepper sauces, etc.) is used as an table condiment (but, again, sparingly) is with dianxin (aka "dim sum") - dumplings and other mostly steamed foods, often eaten for breakfast or brunch, in the southeastern coastal cuisines.  

Historically, the Chinese preference for salt in the form of soy sauce salt was partly due to tax policies. The gabelle, or salt tax, was a major source of government revenues in China from the Han dynasty (220 BC) on.  Salt diluted in soy sauce was less expensive than sea salt or rock salt, and made it was easier to minimize consumption of an expensive commodity.

There are many different kinds of soy sauce, all  fermentation products. You should be aware (but not alarmed) that all contain significant quantities of monosodium glutamate, or MSG.  Japanese chemists discovered MSG as an active ingredient in soy sauce (and also in kelp/seaweed broth) early in the 20th Century, thereby laying the foundation for the Ajinomoto corporate empire. MSG is the basis for umami, the fifth basic "taste" which can be detected by specialized cells on the surface of your tongue - the others are bitter, salty, sour and sweet.

One of my all-time favorite experiences in life was going to an excellent Chinese restaurant in Hong Kong with a very uptight American woman who repeatedly insisted that I make it clear to the chef and all members of his family that she absolutely could not tolerate even a microgram of MSG in her food, etc. etc. etc.  I sighingly complied with her pointless request, and then watched as she proceeded to dump half a bottle of soy sauce over her bowl of rice and consuming it.

Imagine, if you will, taking someone to a restaurant like the French Laundry or Alain Ducasse and having to watch your guest drown their meal with ketchup or A1 steak sauce. Imagine, if you will, different approaches to the problem of killing someone while seated at a white cloth covered table in full view of dozens of restaurant staff and other diners.

For the record, Chinese soy sauce has about 1000 mg of MSG per 100 grams, versus 1400-1900 mg in 100 g of Vegemite or Marmite, which are also soy fermentation products.  There is also 1200 mg of MSG in 100 g. of Parmesan cheese (pesto, anyone?), 300 mg in 100 g of fresh green peas and 140 mg in the same quantity of tomatoes.  

If you're convinced MSG is bad for you, and if you intend to make a big scene about it every time you go to a Chinese restaurant (at any rate, with me), then do be consistent.  No soy sauce on anything, ever, nor Parmesan cheese on anything, ever, either. And it's probably best if you avoid those MSG-laden peas and tomatoes.

Most Chinese do eat less meat than Westerners do, but vegetarian cooking isn't that common in China. (Myself, I finally gave up vegetarianism when I moved to Taiwan in 1970 to study Chinese.) But interesting alternative vegetarian versions of most of the main regional cuisines were developed by and for Buddhists, and are well worth a try.

First, however, I'd advise you to get a good Chinese cookbook. Mine, The Good Food of Szechuan - definitely not vegetarian in orientation - is long out of print, but used copies pop up on Amazon and elsewhere from time to time.  It will tell you what to do (and what not to do) with a bottle of soy sauce.

Lastly, I'd urge you to lighten up on the beans and rice (let's not even think about the veggies over rice drowned in soy sauce ever again) and explore some of the wonderful different cous cous, tabbouli, raw or lightly cooked vegetables served with cucumber and yoghurt raita or hummous, and the wonderful worlds of composed raw vegetable salads.

Robert Delfs

Necessary? Probably...

Even if it wasn't absolutely necessary, it must have felt good.  

I just finished the last pages of James Lovelock's "Revenge of Gaia" at breakfast this morning. Is this book apocalypse porn? Is Lovelock over the top? I'm trying to decide for myself. While I don't buy everything Lovelock is saying, his overall arguments are richer, more nuanced and take much more into account than the reviews and critiquesI read before I got the book had led me to believe.  

That led me to think about Gristmill and whether I wanted to devote the time and energy to try to organize my thoughts about Lovelock's book and post them here. I asked myself, what is it that people on Gristmill seem to be most concerned about these days. A five (four?) point Statement of Principles on Animal Welfare that I am supposedly obligated to accept if I want to continue to call myself an environmentalist. Something about the rights of mosquitos?

Months ago, when Jason first began proselytizing for the idea of injecting an animal rights agenda into environmentalism, I was primarily concerned that serious discussions about environmental issues might be diluted by trivia or displaced by what are essentially intra-cult doctrinal questions and debates. (whales vs. mosquitos, how sentient is a rat, animal predation vs. human zoophagy, etc. etc.)

While I'd rather read (and talk about) Lovelock, Hansen, energy, climate change, I acknowledge that there are - or at least were - serious issues at stake here, some of which were raised early on.  Lately, however, this has devolved into a barren and seemingly interminable rant, in which anyone resisting the new animal rights orthodoxy is taunted as morally obtuse or 'unwilling to learn.'

Jason's proposed Nicene Creed for environmentalists, however, does mark a new low point. Will we be excommunicated if we refuse to sign?  Why is this man so bent on dictating what the rest of us may think or believe?  

Robert Delfs

Over-simplification?

Caniscandida,

I don't think I ever suggested that Jessica Sandler's letter to the Secretary of Commerce Gutierrez was not phrased in respectful terms. I did, however, intend the implication that  Sandler's letter to Guterrez was a laughably pointless gesture.

I'm more taken (flummoxed?) by your statement that PETA's position on animal testing is in reality "complex and nuanced, and should not be prejudicially simplified."  

If my admittedly hasty reading of the documents on PETAs website (the one I'm referring is <http://www.StopAnimalTests.com> somehow led me to misconstrue PETA's actual osition on animal testing, then of course I would like to retract these earlier remarks and apologize.  Perhaps you could guide me to a more authoritative statement of PETA's more "nuanced and compex" actual position on animal testing?

Robert Delfs

Thanks, Justin

...for the very useful, informative comments.  How is it that you were in the court for this historic case?

Robert Delfs

Misleading comparisons

I wasn't indicting the animal rights/welfare movement per se, just those groups so committed to imposing a complete ban on animal testing that they refused to recognize the importance of - as Kaela put it - "working with the medical research community to ensure the highest possible standards of animal care", and were blind to the risk that banning testing in the US in Europe (or making it prohibitively expensive) might simply lead to more animals  being cruelly abused as testing moved to other countries with even weaker regulatory and legal protections.  

There are indeed parallels where earnest and well-meaning efforts by US activists have had counter-productive results. The first Clinton Adminstration's attempt, in the early post-Tiananmen years, to use trade sanctions to force China to release political prisoners is one horrendous example.

But the argument that the campaign to ban animal testing is comparable to the US labor movement, or that "American labor laws have just moved child labor elsewhere" seems badly misplaced. Contra David and Willa, child labor certainly didn't "move" to China, India or anywhere else after it was outlawed in the US, nor was it a result of labor reforms in the US or Europe.  

The movement to secure laws and regulations to ensure safe conditions, reasonable hours and pay, and to protect children from workplace exploitation are more closely analogous to efforts to improve the care and treatment of animals involved in testing (in the US and elsewhere), than to PETA's call to end all animal testing.  I'm not aware that anyone has ever seriously argued for banning work - of any kind, by anyone - in the US.

In 2000-2001 I had a client in China, an NGO that trains eye doctors in development countries. As a result of that work, I had considerable contact with the quasi-governmental organization (hived off from the Chinese Ministry of Health China in 1999)in charge of arranging human clinical trials for foreign pharmaceutical companies. This was starting be become a big business then, and it is certainly much bigger now.  Kaela is, of course, correct when she says that outsourcing of medical research (to China as well as Europe and other countries) has indeed been going on for some time, and that there is ample reason for concern about treatment of human subjects in these trials.

To my knowledge, however, outsourcing animal testing for foreign pharmaceutical companies to China is new, or at least relatively so.  Given the huge reported differentials in costs, the scale of the shift to animal testing in China could become huge within a relatively short period of time.

Robert Delfs

I know I couldn't take it

I know it's a wonderful place,  but this is the reason I've never even considered living in the US northwest.  I get depressed when two or three days go by without good sun -  I can't even imagine what a month of dark skies and rain would do to the soul.  

I'm writing this from Hong Kong, where it's been dark and rainy since I arrived Sunday night. Despite the heavy rain, the air pollution here has been terrible. It's intensely Blade Runner-esque. Three days are enough - I can't wait to get back to Indonesia and sun.

Robert Delfs

No DDT for us, thanks, we're Americans...

But if you hang around the wrong liberals and environmentalists, you might misinterpret the thrust of Jeff Dorchen (and others)' opposition to neo-cons  exploitation of the DDT issue to imply that the World Health Organization's recent decision to endorse wider use of DDT indoors in areas where malaria presents a serious health risk, particularly to children.

I really liked Jeff Dorchen's balanced explanation of these issues, which pointed out that:

Responsible organizations and individuals who advocate using DDT to control malaria want it used sparingly, indoors, to exploit DDT's repellent and irritant effects and avoid developing resistant mosquito populations. However, resistance in mosquitoes to even these effects is not uncommon. Still, Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Federation support indoor use of DDT. The World Health Organization does, too. The 2001 Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPS) bans twelve environmentally hazardous chemicals that persist in the environment and the food chain for years without breaking down completely. DDT is the only one of those twelve with an exemption from the ban for indoor use to fight malaria.

The Stockholm Convention's and the environmental NGOs' tolerance for limited use of DDT is, without doubt, thanks to outspoken groups fighting malaria in the developing world. But there are two types of these groups. One type actually fights malaria. The other uses falsehoods about DDT's history, and (limited) usefulness, as propaganda for smearing environmentalism in general. These propaganda groups, the Astroturf groups, are backed by big corporations, such as Exxon, and quasi-libertarian think tanks including the Cato Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, who seek to remove all limits on corporate behavior.

Just so we're all clear, there are good people and responsible organizations who are engaged in fighting malaria who want to be able to use DDT when it makes sense, and there are also  'bad guys' with ulterior motives who want to libel environmentalism.  Please don't get them confused.  

Robert Delfs

Thanks

That was a wonderful interview with Patzert.  

Robert Delfs

Thanks, CanisCandida

Let me assure you that I'm always happy to shoot not just reptiles and marine mammals (as well as fishies) but also any and all invertebrates. Nobody is into phylocentric snobbism around here.

Just because someone doesn't have a backbone doesn't mean they don't have a heart, or that they can't feel, or be hurt, or get crushed into an icky paste if you're not careful and accidentally put something heavy down on top of them. That's why it sometimes pays to be a crustacean or - if you're a mollusk - to have a good hard shell, But nudibranchs and holothurians still rock.

Not all inverts are shy, retiring, or small. Tridacna gigas (below) is the biggest bivalve mollusc species in the world, and this one, at Melissa's Reef in Raja Empat, is the biggest individual I've ever seen. Longways, it measured about 1.7 meters. The non-mollusk is Mark Heighes, who I will be diving with on this coming trip as well.

And my ballot's in the mail.  But I do regret that I'll probably miss all the Thomas Foley jokes that I'm sure are about to hit the net-osphere.

Robert Delfs

Sorry, Patrick

I didn't notice your previous message, in which you asked about the project I worked on in Western China.  

I worked as a consultant on a privately-funded aid project to introduce processing-variety oranges and modern citriculture techniques into the Three Gorges region of what was then Sichuan Province, but became part of greater Chongqing.  

The core of the project was a greenhouse and screenhouse facility (built using mostly Israeli technology) and a demonstration grove used for testing and training farmers in modern citrus horticulture techniques, brought in US processing variety cultivars and rootstocks. The project was located in Zhongxian, and employed a large number of local farmers plus a core team of trained specialists from all over China supplemented with part-time consultants from the US.  Over seven years, a total of 3,500 ha (8,650 acres) of  groves were constructed and planted out with about 1.2 million high quality trees. We also built and equipped a primary school near the project center.

All the trees, grove design, engineering, etc. was provided to farmers at no cost (which may have been a mistake). We also set up an agricultural extension service to support the new groves. At the end of the project, all the facilities were turned over to the Chinese government, and are still in use.

The first groves developed are now bearing fruit in commercial quantities, and several commercial processing facilities are now in operation or under construction.  

A major commercial citrus processing project located in Guangxi failed catastrophically in the 1990s due to uncontrollable pest and disease pressures. One major objective of our project was simply to demonstrate that high-quality processing citrus varieties could be grown successfully in this region. Chongqing government is now in the process of planting out another 35,000 ha (86,500 acres) of processing citrus varieties, including some of ours.

This will eventually make it possible for China to establish a processing juice production base in the Three Gorge which could replace a significant portion of juice imports (all of which currently comes from Brazil) with domestic supplies, and will also provide a long-term source of sustainable agriultural employment for farming families in this poor region.

I also worked on other ag-related projects, but this was the biggest and most important. I was intensely involved for about six years.

Robert Delfs

Thanks freedom 410, others...

It's nice to see thoughtful, careful comments about a very complex and difficult situation. There are no easy answers for people trying to work in countries like Burma.  It's not just environmental work - similar issues arise for people working on basic health and human services, including childhood nutrition and blindness.  

Is it right to punish people by denying them health care, infant nutrition, or other basic services because they live in a dictatorship imposed on them by force? The same logic may apply to animals, endangered species and threatened eco-systems.  Burm'a rhinos aren't responsible for SLORC. Unfortunately, working in Burma almost inevitably involves some degree of accomodation with the regime. How much is too much? Good, reasonable people don't always agree on where to draw those lines.  Which is why we should not to rush to judgment.

I don't claim to know much about Burma, but I know people who do, some standing on both sides of these debates. They disagree, but most also acknowledge that these are not easy calls and  there are no automatic right answers. I also know some people working in the exile organizations against SLORC. They are dedicated, serious people, but view matters through a single lens, and their denunciations of people trying to do important work in Burma haven't always been balanced or fair.

Robert Delfs

Blind on the farm

Bookerly wrote: "One, the average size of farms is 1.6 acres, which mean most farmers do no have the resources to invest heavily in pesticides and fertilizers.  Which hardly means that such do not exist, just that their use is not as widespread...The other is that farmers do not own their own land, they rent from the government.  

I wish it were true that farmers in China don't over-use pesticides, but sadly they do. In general, pesticides are also poorly selected (whatever is available or cheapest), misapplied (wrong concentration, not applied at vulnerable point in the life-cycle of targeted pests, or inadequate or excessive application), and all too often applied using back-back sprayers used without masks or protective clothing. Some nasty pesticides which have been banned in North America and Europe for years are still widely used in China.  

Estimates of average farm size in China are all over the lot, so you may have actually read the "1.6 acres" figure somewhere, but more plausible estimates range from 0.13-0.40 ha (0.3-1.0 acres) per household nationwide.

In any case, the new farms for cut flower exports that the NYT article is talking about are not small family operations anyway. As the author wrote, these are "giant" operations. That may even be good news as far as pesticide use is concerned. Large, export-oriented operations in China tend to do a better job of selecting and applying pesticides than family farmers. Sometimes they even require workers to wear protective masks and clothing. An ecolabel program could help a lot, particularly if it included better protection from pesticide exposure for farm workers.

China's post-1984 rural land tenure system is too complicated to explain here, but to summarize it as "farmers do not own their own land, they rent from the government" is grossly misleading and utterly incorrect. Try googling "China land tenure" - there is an extensive literature on this subject.

I'm sorry if what I've written seems harsh, but I worked on agriculture development and aid projects in remote areas of China's western provinces for many years.  Slinging misconceptions about these important issues doesn't really help. The PANNA (Pesticide Action Network) database that Amy recommended has some excellent, informative articles about pesticide use on Chinese farms.

Robert Delfs

I'm sure you'll have a wonderful lunch...

Quammen takes on very complex and difficult moral issues are invariably insightful and dispassionate. He seems never be get seduced into taking the cheap and easy shots. I'm a big fan.  

Robert Delfs

It really is a great wall

Encarta also had a good article on the history of Chinese wall building, calling the Ming Walls .... "ineffective, as the Mongols were easily able to pass around or break through them during raids."

The Great Wall in Ming times actually worked reasonably well. The only serious military defeat of the Ming by the Mongols was the Tumu Incident of 1449, when the Zhengtong Emperor led a huge army out beyond Juyong Gate onto the steppe in what was supposed to be a punitive expedition against the Mongol forces led by Esen Khan.  The Ming army was destroyed and Emperor was captured.

It was said that the 22-year old Zhengtong and his reviled eunuch chief advisor, Wang Zhen, refused to to be constrained to seek only reality-based solutions to their Mongol problem.

The present-day sections of the wall north of Beijing that tourists visit (shown in your photo) were substantially built (or rebuilt) after the Tumu debacle. All the wall was ever supposed to do was slow down an  invading Mongol cavalry force long enough for Chinese infantry to shift toward the point of breach and reinforce it. It did that perfectly well, enabling China to defend its northern border successfully with a much smaller (and cheaper) military force than would have been required without it.

The wall wasn't the sole reason, of course, but even though the Mongols remained a threat, they never again mounted a major incursion inside China proper during the 196 years that the Ming Dynasty endured after Tumu, or indeed afterwards.  

Keep in mind that China had been conquered by Mongols after nearly a half century of war (1209-1271) andruled (or rather misruled, brutally, by most accounts) by the Mongol Khans for nearly a hundred years prior to the Ming Restoration in 1368.  The Ming had good reason to take the Mongol threat seriously.

So I'm not sure that the analogy between the wall and the waste of US resources in Iraq really holds.

Robert Delfs

Moral equivalence?

CanisCandida wrote:

I am much more surprised by your reaction than by David's.  That you felt that you needed to support your rhetoric by resorting to vocabulary from a religious tradition that apparently you do not understand very well, is unfortunate.

Did I really misconstrue the traditions of your Church so badly? Perhaps the full meaning of concepts like doctrinal truth, heresy, excommunication and moral error are simply beyond my poor understanding. If so, then I hope you'll enlighten this uncouth heathen where he got it so wrong.

Otherwise, I'd ask that you not dismiss the fears of unbelievers regarding inquisition and purges so lightly. As anyone who has worked in China during the past half century knows well, the petty internal cleansing the church undertook in medieval Europe as only one of many similar episodes. This sort of abuse happens all all the time, all over the world. Don't imagine I'm alone in viewing Jason's proposed tests of moral virtue, presented as the new orthodoxy, as abhorrent.

You say that your own views on the tension between environmentalism vs. animal rights are quite distinct from Jason's, but you profess to admire his willingness to divide supporters of environmentalism over this issue, and presumably also his evident enthusiasm for purging from the ranks of environmentalists anyone whose behavior and moral standards don't quite meet the mark.

Fair enough. Who would have thought that the environmental movement would have survived this long without a schism to render it all null and void. There might be world enough and time for us to debate who shall be purged from the ranks of the good and worthy. That would certainly be easier than doing something constructive. I hope you'll let me know when you and Jason have finished compiling your lists, and which one I'm on. (But I think I can guess.)

I'll leave it to David Roberts to say whether your backtracking on the moral equivalence of animal feed lots and Nazi death camps was sufficient. It wasn't for me.

Robert Delfs

Biodiversivist...

I proposed a similar set of solutions in a book I wrote.

What book?

Robert Delfs

Here we go again...

Jason,

Despite promising myself (and you) that I'd stay out of this, I also don't feel I can keep letting these tendentious and artificial arguments pass by unchallenged.

You keep repeating in so many words that you believe anyone who is "perfectly comfortable with the types of slaughter that the articles above describe [seal clubbing, dolphin slaughter] is not in [your] opinion an environmentalist."

You don't happen to be holding in your hand a list of names of the environmentalists who support whaling, or those other moral wretches who are  perfectly comfortable with the Canadian seal pup slaughter or the mass dolphin killings in Japan, do you?

I'm not even sure such persons actually exist, but if they do, would you consider showing mercy if were show repentence and are willing to testify at your hearing, inform on their colleagues and friends, naming names?  I imagine it like this:

J.S. [Gavelling hearing to order]:  "OK, Mr. Environmentalist. Are you now - or have you ever at any time in the past - been guilty of eating a tuna fish sandwich? And how long have you been psychologically addicted to slaughtering whales and clubbing seals."

Several of us (Steve Erickson, for one, me for another) who were formerly engaged in this discussion have repeatedly asked you to climb down from what you imagine to be the moral high ground of condemning dolphin slaughter and seal clubbing to clarify where you stand on realistic and genuinely troubling ethical issues that are relevant to any proposal to impose the animal rights agenda on all environmentalists.

One question you have been asked is whether you could accept the necessary killing of feral, introduced animals in order to protect endangered or endemic plants (as in Washington State's Olympia Peninsula), or to maintain habitats, or to sustain prey populations to support an endangered endemic predator (as in Indonesia's Komodo National Park), or simply as a humane way of reducing populations that have grown excessively large due to the disappearance of former predators or other anthropogenic factors.

These are hardly remote hypothetic cases - similar quandaries arise in the real practice of biodiversity conservation all the time. This is also a reasonable question because, as we know, some animal rights advocates, as a matter of principle, would not countenance the intentional killing of animals under these circumstances.

Would you like to answer?  Or would you prefer to go on implicitly accusing anyone who doesn't agree with all the arguments you have outlined so far of harbouring suppressed urge to harpoon whales, slaughter dolphins and club baby seals?

Robert Delfs

Polymorphous perverse?

CanisCandida wrote and asked: "On the other hand, many cephalopods do all sorts of amazing things with coloration, whether or not they have much of a past involving LSD use.  So what makes Thaumactopus so extraordinary?"

Many cephalopods roduce amazing changes in color and visual patterns on their skin by changing the size of chromatophores and leucophores.  The former are small pigmented cells which can be expanded or contracted in a manner analogous to pixels on a LCD, while leucophores contain reflective and scattering layers. Making them visible creates the color white.  There are also iridophores, which contain tiny plates stacked closely enough to interfer with certain wavelengths of light, generating an iridescent metallic-paint like sheen.

That's not all.  By contracting tiny rings of muscle in the skin, cephalopods can change their external texture and shape, orming spikes, bumps, flaps, and even elaborate branching structures - and then make them disappear instantly.

All this is for the purposes of disguise and camouflage, threat display (the blue-ringed octopus)or as a means of communication among conspecifics during courtship and mating.

Behavioral mimicry is different matter altogether.  The Mimic Octopus - if I may be a bit pedantic too, the shorthand for Thaumoctopus mimicus isn't Thaumoctopus, it's T. mimicus - reportedly takes on the physical shape and behavioral characteristic of other animals - some venemous - such as flounder, lionfish, banded sea snake, jawfish, or jellyfish. Other claims include impersonations of snake eels, crinoids and stingrays.

Some observers claim they have seem mimics run through their entire repertoire in sequence, as if saying "So you don't buy it that I'm a poisonous seasnake.  Would you believe a jellyfish?  No, well how about..."

But a few caveats.  

First, mimicry among cephalopods is not unique to the protean T. mimicus. Caribbean reef squids are known to hunt by disguising themselves as parrotfish, complete with  fake eyes and a fake forked tail (formed by tentacles). Bigfin reef squids (Sepioteuthis lessoniana sometimes hide in a patch of garden eels, stretching and curving their bodies to take on the shape of the swaying eels in their holes.  

Smaller Giant cuttlefish  (Sepia apama) males have adopted a kinky approach to getting past dominant males guarding egg-laying females - cross-dressing!  Males and females typically adopt characteristic color patterns during courtship and mating. By making themselves look like females, smaller males sometimes get past the large males guarding a gravid female unchallenged.

But it's only fair to admit that some people think the shap-shifting behavioral skills of the Mimic octopus may have been over-sold.  The so-called flounder disguise, for example, is actually a manner of swimming used by several other species of octopuses. It could just an efficient, low-profile way for an octopus to slink around on the reef.  

I've seen Mimmic octopuses on three occasions. They were beautiful creatures, and their behavior was very interesting, but I must admit that I never seen one doing anything I am completely persuaded was a form of behavioral mimicry.

Robert Delfs

Yes, it's very 'Calvin & Hobbes'

I think Calvin's full version would be:

BIG Climate Change Technology Program Strategic Plan Laser Patrol ATTACK SQUADRON...and no GIRLZ ALLOWED!

And yes, I can sort of see our fearless President as a six year old wearing a paper hat and brandishing a wooden sword, stalking about in a tree-house version of the White House, lecturing an over-stuffed animal (er, I mean the vice president) and persuading himself that he actually always was in favor of halting global warming and protecting the environment.

Some people have said that Bush's volte face on global warming as just a pure cynical exercise, but it might also be an attempt to shore up an historical legacy as a president that even Bush knows may read harshly. Whoever is elected President in 2008, regardless of their party, would have moved quickly to reverse at least some of the Bush Administration's do-nothing or worse-than-do-nothing policies on global warming and the environment.  

Posturing with a Calvin-esque, self-deluding, new "Strategic Plan" now is partly about heading off more substantive initiatives that might hurt Bush's backers and friends, and it's also partly about heading off Al Gore's critique of Republican inaction in the run-up to the mid-term elections at a time when more and more Americans find Gore's analysis of the climate crisis plausible and compelling.

But this also gives Bush's defenders and future hagiographers badly needed wriggle room on the question of whether George W. Bush should be held responsible for doing more cumulative, long-term damage to our planet than any other human being who ever lived.

And on that question, I can only quote Mark Slackmayer, the great Gary Trudeau character, who on the subject of John Mitchell's responsibility over Watergate uttered the balanced judgment:

GUILTY, GUILTY, GUILTY, GUILTY!!

Robert Delfs

Potatoes today; mangoes and coconut palms tomorrow

If James Lovelock is right, this may be the time for developers to get in on the ground floor building survival-and-surf beach resorts on the Greenland coast for all the would-be refugees from below latitude 60 that will be coming in 2025.

Robert Delfs

Doncha hate deties who duck any responsibility...

How about:

"You mean you people.. BURNED the fossilized organics?" Oh my ..."  -- God.

Keagan, the Weimartriever who shares my life, is dyslexic (like many canines) so she constantly confuses "god" .. and "dog" - that is, herself. She believes that the food offerings which Balinese leave lying on the ground for the Hindu gods are intended for her.

It's a harmless delusion, plus it's nice for me to have a sounding board for my complaints about the state of the universe. Not that she is willing to take any responsibility - Oh no, not that! When it's the beauty and the endless variety of life, or the wondrous magic of evolution, then it's all about her. But when it comes to the global warming, over-population, mass extinctions, and pollution, then somehow it's all my fault.

And Bart's go a point. Why can't we "get serious about efficiency and conservation, the way other species have?"  You don't see the the birds and the bees driving around in SUVs, do you?  If we could just match Antarctica's PPEI (per penguin energy intensity), we'd already be there, plus we'd have all this guano so we wouldn't need any more chemical fertilizers.  So what gives?

Robert Delfs

Can we make ethanol out of strawmen?

Gee, biodiversivist, you and David Roberts sure have it out for Friedman, or ethanol, or maybe both. I'm not really a fan of Friedman, and I'm agnostic about ethanol. Friedman hasn't yet persuaded me ethanol is viable, but nor have you convinced me that it's nuts. (I'm waiting for a rigorous comparative analysis and projection of all real costs - including the energy consumed growing corn or sugar cane.) In any case, my preferred heresy is nuclear power.

But I think you and David misrepresent some of Friedman's arguments in order to knock them down, which should be a no-no. You wrote that Friedman states..

.. Brazil could be the 'Saudi Arabia of sugar,' suggesting that we should get rid of our 54 cent tariff on imported sugar ethanol. Never mind that this would scratch the biggest argument presently being used by our government, farmers, and car manufacturers for supporting and subsidizing ethanol -- independence from foreign sources of fuel (the God-bless-America argument).

I could understand your opposition to losing this tariff if I thought you owned shares in Archer-Daniel-Midland (our slogan: the world's greatest price fixer) or if you planned to pay for your Prius with gains from a long position in corn futures. (Congrats on your car and the tax break, by the way.) But neither of those seem likely.  So why?

US Energy independence per se isn't so important. The point is that importing more ethanol from Brazil would not increase the political leverage of Saudi Arabia or Iran one iota. Not so importing more petroleum. In any case, the arguments for US energy independence are mainly political and economic, not environmental. Lower tariffs and higher imports of ethanol from Brazil would lower ethanol prices in the US while raising them in Brazil. Is this is a problem?  You also wrote:

Sugarcane has already hit a limit. It is more profitable now to sell it for food. The more fuel makers pay for sugar, the more the fuel will cost (and food). This will soon happen here with soy and corn, and in this country, this will probably mean higher government subsidies (for both) in an endless circle of government meddling and market distortion.

Hmm. Maybe in the US where gas still seems as cheap as water (compared to Europe or Asia).  Amory Lovins and his colleagues at the Rocky Mountain Institute (in Winning the Oil Endgame,) wrote that:

In recent years, the Brazilian untaxed retail price of hydrous ethanol has been lower than that of gasoline per gallon. It has even been cheaper than gasoline--and has matched our 2025 cellulosic ethanol cost--on an energy-equivalent basis for some periods during 2002-04.

This isn't really my field, but I would not be surprised if the relative costs of gasoline and ethanol continue to jump around for a few years.  Long-term, however, ethanol's cost advantage relative to petroleum-based gasoline will only get better, especially after cellulosic hits.

Anyway, I wouldn't mind if Americans used more high-fructose corn syrup for driving back and forth to the mall in their SUVs and fed less of it into their bloodstreams in the form of processed food and soft drinks, but I suppose this also is not really an environmental argument. You wrote:

There is no guarantee that cellulosic ethanol will ever become economically viable (still waiting for fusion), and most importantly, if it does, we certainly won't need sugarcane to make it. Many sources of cellulose we can grow here will do.

Well, there are no guarantees about anything, but the odds that cellulosic conversion technology is coming certainly improved after gasoline prices in the US hit $3 a gallon earlier this year. Most of the scientists writing about it seem to think cellulosic is in the pipeline, likely to hit in 5, 10 or at most 15 years. Is there a good reason to suspect these projections are flawed?

Friedman was writing about what Brazil, so of course he talked a lot about about ethanol from sugar cane. But he never suggested the US should rely on sugarcane to make ethanol, as you imply. Friedman certainly knows that we have other sources of cellulose, and that the US will rely more on corn and other crop residues for cellulose to make ethanol, not sugar cane bagasse.

Also, I don't think Friedman actually said the government should force force fuel distributors to provide ethanol fuel pumps at all their gas stations. I think he said just more of them. (But I've already thrown the newspaper with his column in it away, so I can't recheck that.)  

Again, I'm not trying to defend the substance of Friedman's arguments, and I'm certainly not saying that this is a wonderful column.  But if it really is absolutely wrong-headed, or even if Friedman just badly over-stated or over-simplified the case he was making, it shouldn't be necessary to put words in his mouth that he never said in order to prove it.

Robert Delfs

Defending NGOs

Biodiversity,  I hope you're feeling better. I've found the traditional advice - keeping one's eyes fixed on the horizon - can be as effective in dealing with metaphorical nausea as it is with the real thing.  

One wishes that there were someone knowledgeable from one of the groups involved in rhino conservation who could respond to Whiskerface's accusations. Here is a list of links to some of these organizations that could be helpful to anyone who would like to pursue this further.

As you noted, Whiskerfish has made some very serious charges.  I wish I were well informed enough to comment, but I'm not. However, I have noticed, as you also pointed out, that the climate of cynicism and suspicion surrounding the big international environmental NGOs has reached a point where many people will believe almost any accusation, no matter how ill-founded or farfetched.

As the global pace of extinctions accelerates, we are seeing a twisted, misleading logic which maintains that the major wildlife NGOs (or their "inattention") should be held responsible for each and every species lost - not the poachers, polluters, destroyers of habitats, illegal traders, corrupt police or greedy officials.  

It's true that the aggregate funds mobilized by the major environmental NGOs over the past decade represent very substantial amounts of money, and one can always argue more should have been spent on x, or y, or z. But the big NGOs' funds were never infinite. It will never be possible for them (or anyone else) to save every species, assist every population under threat, or succour every animal in distress.

Decisions about the allocation of resources have to be made. Those decisions will never be fully satisfactory to everyone. And they are always easy to second guess.

The "Big Green" NGOs have made serious mistakes around the world. There have been tragic failures and many missed opportunities. This won't change - we're all human, all of us fallible, and there is no magic guide or map laying out the right course of action for every situation.

Accusations that NGOs have "acted arrogantly" toward local officials and members of local communities have been widespread in many countries, and some of these charges are undoubtedly justified. But there are also cases where these and other accusations were motivated by resentment because an NGO refused to pay a bribe or exorbitant jacked-up fee, or wouldn't hire someone's friend or relative.

Some attacks have also been attributed to persons close to interested parties (developers, mines, timber companies, even poachers and traders in illegal timber and animals) with powerful political connections.

Finally, false accusations have come from other NGOs, some based in sincerely held differences over approach or methodology; others motivated by internecine rivalry and competition, or someone's political or ideological agenda.

Conservation work intersects with people's lives and affects their interests in many different ways, and not everyone will always be happy with the prospect or outcome of even the most successful project. This shouldn't be surprising to anyone  - it's just the way the world works. It's nothing to get sick over.

Truth in Advertising: I have worked as a consultant for NGOs and private companies involved in conservation-related projects. I have never worked for any organization involved in rhino conservation in Africa. None of the general remarks that I've made here should be misconstrued as comments or allegations regarding any NGOs involved in rhino conservation in Africa or their critics.

Caniscandada:  As for what happened to 'Frogfish', ask David Roberts.

Robert Delfs

Manila, Rio and the Axis of Evil

I read Friedman's op-ed today too, David, and I think you may be being a bit harsh.

The vast gap between the US and Brazil's per-capita energy use would be relevant to an argument that expanding ethanol production would make the US more energy independent - the  assertion that you and Robert Rapier debunked in the "Brazil is awesome" item last June. But Friedman never says this, or even mentions energy independence, at least not in the version of his column I read.

As a citizen (and occasional consumer), I am concerned about US energy independence, but as an environmentalist (JS please take note), I'm basically indifferent.  The atmospheric effects of the 5.8 billion metric tonnes of carbon dioxide emitted by the US each year (2002 data) don't change according to how much (or little) of the fossil fuels which generated it are imported in the US or domestically produced.

If (as Friedman claims) Brazil has replaced 40% of its gasoline consumption with ethanol, then Brazil's carbon emissions may indeed have been reduced, as long as total fuel consumption did not rise enough higher than the level under a no-ethanol regime enough to cancel out the effect, which seems unlikely.  

Regarding the the difference between "corn-based and cellulosic" ethanol, I wish I understood what Friedman's "error" and the point you're trying to make might be, but I don't.  

As I understand it, cellulosic conversion technologies (allowing conversion to ethanol from cellulose biomass to ethanol) would be a boon for producers of sugar-cane based ethanol (making it possible to utilize bagasse) and corn-based ethanol (who could then utilize stalks and leaves).  Friedman states that Brazil expects a breakthrough in cellulosic conversion technology that would more than double the volume of ethanol that could be extracted from a single sugar stalk within five years, so Brazil's program may be ahead of US efforts to develop corn cellulosic conversion processes. (The Department of Energy says here that cellulosic conversion technology would reduce the cost of producing ethanol from corn by as much as $0.60 a gallon by 2015.)  

In any case, I'm not aware that Brazil is producing any cellulosic ethanol in commercial volumes today. Even if it were, how does that refute any of the points or arguments that Friedman makes in this column.

Biodiversivist noted in June that the US doesn't produce much cane sugar, which is true, and the reason why the huge US tariffs imposed on cane sugar (and cane sugar-based ethanol!) are so grotesque. Are we trying to protect US "ethanol independence"?  Right.

Back in the beginning, during the Kennedy administration, the steep tariffs on imported sugar car were ostensibly intended in part to punish Cuba,  but their main effect was to reward beet sugar producers in Louisiana with monopolistic access to the US sweetener market.

Nobody foresaw that US agribusiness would figure out a way to use the punitive tariffs against poor tropical cane sugar producers as the basis for a new industry producing high-fructose corn syrup and putting it in everything you and every other American eats, drinks, wears, or rides in.  (Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma is very good material on how corn grew to be the ultimate agri-industrial commodity.)  

None of this was very pleasant for the world's cane sugar exporters, who were generally located in the tropics, non-OPEC members, and poor.  

One particularly unfortunate victim was the Philippines, which had no other serious commodity for export except copra and palm oil. The wasn't really the Pilipinos' fault. The islands had been a US colony since 1898, and diversifying the islands' plantation-based quasi-feudal economy had never been a priority for its American overseeers.

Cutting the Philippines off from the US sweetener market was doubly tacky, given the bitter price that the Pilipinos paid for being part of America during World War II (and continue to pay in other ways today).  But hperhaps they were lucky. Had the US oil majors ever perceived the Philippine and its sugar cane fields as a pontential future competitor to gasoline made from fossil fuels, I'm sure things would have gone worse.

Robert Delfs

KZN Rhinos

I was saddened to read poachers entered Hluhluwe-Imfolozi Game Reserve in KwaZulu-Natal and killed two rhinos, but it was encouraging that rangers were able to capture the poachers and seize their vehicles, tools and weapons. If only they could have intervened sooner. (Click here for larger image.)

Either or both of the white rhinos in this photograph could have been the ones the poachers killed. I took this picture near the main road only a few miles from Hilltop Camp in Hluhluwe-Imfolozi (where the poachers stayed) in May 2004.

Hluhluwe-Imfolozi is the biggest game reserve in Kwazulu-Natal and one the oldest parks in Africa - it was once the hunting reserve of the Zulu kings. The popular park is relatively well-funded through user fees, and the rangers who work there are professional and well-trained, something that is not true of all parks and reserves in other parts of Africa or other developing countries.

I make this point in response to biodiversivist's comments above because, while sport hunts to raise funds animals bothers me too,  I'm not convinced that ego-compensating wannabe big game hunters are a significant threat to any endangered wildlife in Africa today.  Unsurprisingly, the key issues are still development, habitat loss, and poaching.

The poachers who killed the two rhinos in Kwazulu-Natal - like those accused of slaughtering elephants and hippos in the Congo - were desperate young men willing to kill for ivory and horn to sell, not rich big-game hunters suffering from mid-life crises.

All this simply means that the conventional approaches for protecting these animals - high intensity surveillance and patrolling by rangers and effective prosecution of poachers; enforcing bans on the sale and trade in ivory, rhino horns and other prohibited animal products; and ongoing efforts to protect habitats and expand well-managed protected areas - still work best. These efforts require and deserve our continued, generous support.  

Nonetheless, I'm charmed by biodiversivist's evocative suggestion to present "replica[s] of the ass-end[s]" of the rhinos .. they saved" to contributors to wildlife conservation programs. Could I get this sweet pair (also from Hluhluwe-Imfolozi) done in bronze? Click here for larger image.

A few quibbles about the headline, URL tag for the iol.co.za story, and the illustration. Other reports (on iafrica.com, sabcnew.com) that I've read state that the animals killed were White Rhinos, not black rhinos, which currently are the most endangered. There are more than 1400 White rhinos (Ceratotherium simum) in Hluhluwe-Imfolozi today, but only about 370 Black rhinos (Diceros bicornis).  I'm not positive, but the illustration on the main item looks to me like a rhino with a more pointed snout, and so more likely to be D. bicornis rather than C. simum.

Robert Delfs

Some fish will eat anything

I have never heard of herbivorous fish.  Do such critters exist?  Do they eat plankton?  ... I've never tried eating a squid, except perhaps by accident somewhere in Asia...

Tilapia, members of the Chichlid family of fishes native to Africa and the Mideast, are one of the most important farmed fishes in the world. The American Tilapia Association claims it is the sixth most popular fish consumed in the US as well, but hey, those guys are probably paid to say things like that.  In any case, there's no doubt that tilapia has become one of the most widely consumed fish everywhere in Asia.

Tilapia are omnivorous, but mainly subsist on algae in the wild. Farmed tilapia are usually raised on high-protein pelleted fish food which often contains fish meal or other products derived from shrimps, etc.  In principle, however, there is no reason why tilapia couldn't be raised on a strictly vegetarian diet.

The good things about tilapia include the facts that they are prolific breeders, and that they are capable of gaining as much as 3% body weight per day under controlled conditions, making them possibly the most efficient converter of plant material to protein known. They also taste pretty good.  

Another upside is that Tilapia like to eat duckweed and other invasive water plant pests, making them a promising possible means of biological control, but not without risks.  

The downsides also include the fact that tilapia are incredibly prolific breeders.  These are among of the most aggressive invasive fresh water species known.  Once released in the wild, tilapia may be impossible to eradicate.  And given the opportunity, unfussy tilapia are just as happy to feast on other fishes and animals as on algae or weeds.  

Tilapia have been blamed for causing the extinction of the Rennel Grey teal (Anas gibberifrons remissa) after they were introduced into the Solomon Islands during WWII, for those who keep track of these matters. Apparently the fish ate the young birds. Feral tilapia have become major pests in Florida and many other countries.

Carp and - if I'm not mistaken - catfish are also important  edible farmed fish that can be raised on plant-based foods.

If your commitment to vegetarianism ever diminishes, you should try squid again.  Great taste, and Im not aware of any information indicating that commercially-targeted squid species are in danger in my part of the ocean, though your situation may be different.

Frogfish {Robert Delfs}

Murder most foul

Jerry and Zooey2u reject the suggestion that murder's shocking and negative connotations be reserved solely for killings in which the victim is human.

I always thought 'murder' required not just the victim but that the killer be human as well. I don't think anyone has called the stingray that ended Steve Irwin's life a 'murderer' just yet, though some might call it justifiable homicide (from the animals' point of view) and clueless Australian fans are seeking a pointless revenge by slaughtering stingrays.

We wouldn't normally call it 'murder' if the governor of California were fatally mauled by a bear, or Dick Cheney found pecked to death by revenge-seeking ringed pheasants, or if Geraldo Rivera were dismembered by a giant white shark.  But perhaps I (longingly) digress.

Jerry wrote that "Murder is the intentional killing of another."  I have to ask: Another what? Life-form?  Or something more restrictive, like "sentient being"?

In a parallel thread, Jason Scorce explained he has been trying to make the case that "environmentalism at its core is about respecting life and that separating this from our behavior towards individual living beings doesn't make much sense."

(See So, environmentalists support whaling?. That thread may invoke further inquiries, such as "Have environmentalists stopped beating their spouses yet?" and "Why do environmentalists continue to support rap music with violent lyrics.")

For me, "living beings" is a very broad category, though elsewhere in that posting Jason seems most concerned with "advanced mammals". Does this just mean cetaceans, or we talking comparative SAT scores here? Zooey2u seems to be suggesting that the proportion of DNA shared with humans should be a factor in determining how we treat non-conspecifics. (I think humans and chimps actually share 99%, not just 98%, by the way.)

Many would put primates and cetaceans within the inner circle. Others might add a few species which whom humans have had a long evolutionary partnership, such as canines, some felines, horses, water buffalo, camels and reindeer).  

But this may still be too narrow. Hunting and killing of animals for food has been frequently raised, suggesting that many here would insist that equal consideration be given to all mammals, or even all members of the Phylum chordata. There is a logic to this. Any animal with a central nervous system, even a primitive dorsal notochord, may be minimally sentient - that is, capable of responding to sensory impressions.  

I could live with this, but the idea that killing a deer, a fish, or a bird is murder while slurping an oyster or crunching a shrimp is a non-offense still makes me nervous.  It would be better to avoid phylocentrism altogether. Mollucs, insects, and arachnids insects have sophisticated nervous systems. Anyone who thinks crustaceans are incapable of responding to sensory impressions has never dropped a live lobster into a pot of boiling water - something I never want to do again.

Recent work in Evo Devo has surprised us with how much DNA is shared among all life-forms, including the  so-called "primitive" ones. The same Hox genes that regulate the segments of an embryonic fly larvae determine the skeletal structure of horses and humans.

Earlier this evening, I killed a cockroach. It tried to escape, but failed. I won. Later tonight, I will try to kill all the mosquitos left in my bedroom, though this nightly attempted slaughter is almost never completely successful. Would anyone like to defend the rights of the exquisitely adapted Apicomplexa parasite Plasmodium fulciparum or its hosts? There is a lot of malaria here in Indonesia.  Worldwide, it kills millions of Homo sapiens individuals (mostly children) every year.

As Jason Scorse knows, I could not be more strongly opposed to whaling. Being in the water once with a friendly humpback remains the peak experience of my life.

I do not know how to logically reconcile the reverence I feel for cetaceans and certain other animals with my willingness to tolerate treatment of other animals (including killing them, for food or, in the case of mosquitos, health and convenience) that Jason and other AR activists utterly condemn. I don't even try. But so what? I'm not the one trying to impose new moral obligations on environmentalists.

I would appreciate it if the AR activists here could explain where they draw the line (if they think there is one), and why.  In order to make this exercise meaningful, I suggest adapting biodiversivist's initial question as an operating criterion:

Toward what animals or other living things  would you extend the concept of inalienable rights to the extent that an intentional act which brought about the death of an individual should be considered equivalent in every respect (including morally and legally) to the intentional murder of another human being.  

Frogfish {Robert Delfs}

Carbon emissions and guilt

Kaela,

AB Lovins is an energy efficiency expert, J Lovelock knows atmospheric science.  Neither Lovins nor Lovelock know much about solar energy economics and efficacy.  And they do not pretend to.

Not to quibble, but Lovins does claim to be an authority on the economics and efficacy of nuclear power at least. Or he has so claimed in the recent past.

In a presentation on nuclear power in April 2001, snappily titled "Why Nuclear Powers [sic] Failure in the Marketplace is Irreversible (Fortunately for Nonproliferation and Climate Protection)", Lovins argued that any of his three favored approaches (more efficient end use, more efficiently used gas, and wind power) together with fuel cells and photovoltaics "make nuclear power unnecessary and uneconomic" (and also, presumably, "wrong").  

I don't really hold Lovins personally responsible for China's failure to adopt nuclear power as a major source of new primary energy supply back in the 1980s when it would have counted. But his insistence at that time that China didn't really need more electric power from any source than it already had certainly didn't help.  

Not Giving Up,

Expanding nuclear's share of energy production in China from 2% to just 4% at some point in the future isn't going to cut it in terms dialling back China's carbon emissions. Primary energy production in China leapt from 902,089 million tonnes oil equivalent (mtoe) in 1990 to 1,380,786 mtoe in 2003, reaching 85% of the US 2003 level, an increase of 53% or 3.3% per year. Over 1986-2005, the total growth in China's primary energy production probably exceeded 85%. (See World Development Indicators, 2006.)

The horses have been stampeding through this open barn door for twenty lost years. What we needed was for most of China and India's growth in new primary energy supply to come from nuclear, along with whatever contributions from renewables and efficiency could be had, at the same time replacing as much of the existing carbon-burning base in the rest of the world as possible with nuclear and renewables.  Especially the worst serial carbon emission offenders - the US and Russia.

Europe (which gets 32% of its electric power - not the same as primary energy - from nuclear) and Japan (23.1%) are both well ahead of the US (19.4%) and Russia (16.4%) on this. China and India - whose explosive recent economic growth are responsible for much of the new growth in carbon emissions since 1990 - scrape by only 2.3% and 2.8% (respectively) of their electricity coming from nuclear power.  It didn't have to be this way.

Personally, I do believe that the demonization of nuclear power by some environmentalists and alternative energy gurus (and Lovins certainly did play a part in this) materially contributed to our failure to develop safer, cheaper, and more manageable nuclear technologies that we urgently needed twenty years ago, and which we still need today.

Frogfish {Robert Delfs}

Apocalypse Now

I gather that James Lovelock's case for nuclear power is fleshed out in his new book, Revenge of Gaia: Earth's Climate Crisis and the Fate of Humanity (Basic Books, 2006), the publication of which was one peg for this NYT interview.  (I don't have it yet.)

In a nutshell, Lovelock argues that stabilizing carbon emissions at current levels will not be enough to avert runaway global "heating" (Lovelock's preferred term) that could render much of the planet uninhabitable within the next few decades.  (See also the discussion about this week's Economis cover and Pielke Jr.)  

Lovelock: I think we're headed straight back to the Earth's second stable state, which is a hot state that it's been in many times before in the past. It's about 14 degrees warmer than it is in these parts of the world now. It means roughly that most life on the planet will have to move up to the Arctic basin, to the few islands that [will] still [be] habitable, and to oases on the continents.

Lovelock previously outlined some of his logic in an article published in The Independent in 2004:

" ...with [a current population of] six billion, and growing, few options remain; we can not continue drawing energy from fossil fuels and there is no chance that the renewables, wind, tide and water power can provide enough energy and in time. If we had 50 years or more we might make these our main sources. But we do not have 50 years; the Earth is already so disabled by the insidious poison of greenhouse gases that even if we stop all fossil fuel burning immediately, the consequences of what we have already done will last for 1,000 years. Every year that we continue burning carbon makes it worse for our descendants and for civilization...  Worse still, if we burn crops grown for fuel, this could hasten our decline."

Nuclear, according to Lovelock, is the only practical, available source of energy that does not cause global warming.  On the other hand, he apparently also believes that it may already be too late.

The most striking thing in this interview is Lovelock's insistence that catastrophe is not a distant, far-off risk - it is immediate.  He believes climate change could render much of the planet uninhabitable, starting very soon - "...a matter of perhaps 30 years".

We'll know whether Lovelock is right soon enough, but it's useful to have a credible scientist go on the record like this.  Many people remain unmoved by even the most persuasive arguments for a doomsday scenario, provided it isn't likely to happen within their own lifetimes or the term of their mortgage.

As the NYT article states, Lovelock's work underpins much of modern environmentalism, so his endorsement of nuclear power is no small matter. Asked to clarify his views on renewable energy, Lovelock didn't waffle:

I think they're largely gestures.  If it makes people feel good to shove up a windmill or put a solar panel on their roof, great, do it, but it's no answer at all to the problem."

Environmentalists in the West have been mired for decades in the "Amory Lovins delusion" - the idea that with sufficient good will, enough retreats spent together in the Rockies, and if we simply explained things to them correctly - that the Chinese and Indian would be willing to cap their per capita energy consumption at something close to pre-World War II US levels and accept a permanently inferior standard of living.  That was a fantasy in the 1980s. It still is.  

There were good reasons (like Chernobyl) why environmentalists were cautious about nuclear power. But if Lovelock is right, the intense hostility to nuclear power by leading figures in the search for alternate solutions to the energy crisis such as Lovins may have fatally deterred us from pursuing the only realistic program for averting global catastrophe.

The real agenda to save the planet was not to install more solar heaters on vacation homes in the Rockies  - it was making nuclear power safer and cheaper for everyone, and ensuring that China and India maximally relied on nuclear technologies to expand their primary energy production rather than burning more carbon.

Lovelock's own site also has some useful articles and materials.  

A review of the new book by Brian Hayes in the current American Scientist "Goodness, Gracious, Great Balls of Gaia!" provides caveats and a useful summary of the main points of Lovelock's previous work, including (with Lynn Margulis) the Gaia Hypothesis - the view that the Earth is a tightly coupled self-regulating system comprising the totality of organisms, surface rocks, the oceans and the atmosphere.

Hayes is tough and the few compliments are back hand: (E.g., "I'd like to salvage what I can from this farrago of metaphors gone berserk, because Lovelock is not a crank, or not just a crank; he's quite a creative thinker.") Then again, Hayes has read the new book - I haven't. But Lovelock's immense past accomplishments and their transformative effects on our understanding of the world buy him a lot of slack, at least with me.

Frogfish {Robert Delfs}

Biodiversity not trendy?

Caniscandida,

Could it be that tepid interest in biodiversity conservation here reflects the fact that the majority of participants reside and/or work in the US? For all its many wonders and advantages, temperate parts of North America don't score very high on most biodiversity indices. This could also explain why discovery (or rediscovery) of a single species in the Pacific Northwest was such a big deal, compared to the discovery of an undescribed species on a reef or in a rainforest. Just wondering.

I have no Greek, but googling suggested that Batrachichthys might be an archaic genus name for several closely-related species of South American frogs  distinguished by the unusually large size of their eggs and tadpoles.  You can imagine how this might have led my thinking down very wrong paths.

Albertus Seba (1665-1736), confused by the tetrapod body plan and presumed gait of the Loop-visch (walking fish), believed that antennariids must anuran amphibians, possibly tadpole-like fish stages in the development of an undiscovered giant frog.  He classified them with true frogs under the name Rana Piscatrix.  Linnaeus corrected this error, but left frogfish systematics confused for another generation by groupig all known species under a single name, Lophius histrio.  Philibert Commerson was the first naturalist to use the modern genus name Antennarius in his descriptions of specimens found by Louis Antoine de Bougainville at Mauritius in the 1760s.

So, no use of "Batrachichthys" that I can find in the literature, though the other frogfish genus Histrio was briefly known as Batrachus back in the 1740s.

I like frogfishes because they are so improbable, and so spectacularly cryptic.  Here's one of mine, a A. pictus juvenile.

http://www.onasia.com/system/preview.aspx?pvp=rde0030911....

Frogfish {Robert Delfs}

Environmentalists not responsible for animalrights

Hi Jason,

As with your earlier submission on whaling, I am troubled by what you've written.  In part, this boils down to the assertion that environmentalists are somehow bound to accept in toto your personal moral objections to the slaughter and consumption of animals. If that were all you said, perhaps your posting could be safely dismissed or ignored.

It is one thing to say that environmentalists should feel morally obligated as individuals to examine the ethical aspects of killing and consuming  animals or the more general issue of how our fellow creatures are treated.   It is a different matter to conflate the campaign to end cruelty to animals with environmentalism itself; to exalt this conceptual mishmash as a higher (or "more expansive") form of environmentalism, and then to slam  ny environmentalism that does not incorporate your own conception of animal rights as "morally bankrupt."

What you suggest here is wrong and also dangerous, not least because it threatens the openness and inclusiveness with respect to motivation that has been a crucial factor in the few tentative successes that environmentalism can claim so far in its short, flawed history.  In your comments, you sneered at environmentalists "who try to court hunting or fishing groups" - I applaud them.

Environmentalism's "big tent" - the facts that the movement does not impose rigid ideological or religious tests, that individuals can cooperate in pursuit of common goals without being required to adhere to common systems of belief or morality - has been a crucial strength.  Efforts to hijack the environmental movement in service of other agenda,  as you have done here  - however laudatory or benign your intent may seem in your own mind - threaten our ability to achieve our most important objectives.

The environmental movement is indeed amoral (not just "almost" as you suggest) in the technical (but important) sense that it neither assumes nor prescribes a unitary set of moral beliefs as the sole basis for environmental action or for association with other environmentalists.  People may be motivated to try to save a stand of redwood trees or a population of whales for many different kinds of reasons - moral, aesthetic, religious, scientific, philosophical, or combinations of all the above.  They may be moved by practical considerations, such as diverse biological communities' potential utility as future sources for new pharmaceuticals, or the benefits of maximizing financial returns from habitats managed as economics assets, or the need to ensure continuing stocks of animals for hunting subsistence, commercial and sport hunting and fishing.  

You wrote that excessive tolerance of animal cruelty underlies a "key weakness" of the environmental movement in our time, one which you characterized as excessive focus on sustainability and populations but insufficient concern with the well being of individual animals.  {At several points in this paragraph I'm quoting your earlier email draft, not the final edited submission to Grist.}   This led you to libel those who believe in an inclusive, open, science-based environmentalism as holding a "minimalist view of environmentalism ... which favors avoiding tough moral questions", and which you slam as "morally deficient".   In its place, you have proposed a new environmentalism that "take[s] a more expansive view of environmentalism [and] recognize[s] that while conserving biodiversity is a necessary condition for an environmental ethic, It is not sufficient."

Since it would be premature to voice confidence that environmentalism will actually achieve significant levels of biodiversity protection of over meaningful scales of time (centuries), it seems fatuous in the extreme to suggest that the environmental movement today is overly concerned with sustaining populations and should therefore divert scarce resources to support your own pet schemes for alleviating animal misery.

Perhaps you underestimate the immense challenge of moderating the accelerated loss of habitat and extinction of species and genera currently underway due to human activities (including development, pollution, population growth, over-exploitation of resources, etc.).  At the moment, the estimated rate of extinction exceeds normal background loss of species by a factor of at least 100, possibly a faster rate than any of the five previous "mass extinctions" over the past 550 million years. (Andrew Dobson, cited in Colin Tudge, The Variety of Life, Oxford University Press (2000)).

For many (though not all) practitioners, environmentalism essentially is biodiversity conservation - the effort to protect as many species and habitats as possible.   We have entered a "demographic winter" which is likely to continue for 500-1000 years while the the human population approaches or exceeds 10 billion persons, anthropogenic climate change accelerates, and the risk of planet-wide ecological collapse remains intense. A modest success, defined as the survival of even a significant fraction of the genera and species and their habitats still left on the planet right now 5 or 10 centuries hence - would be an immense achievement, much more than "sufficient".    

I do not mean to minimize the moral implications of actions that directly or indirectly cause intolerable pain or death to one or to many animals, nor would I ever want to limit your efforts to proselytize on behalf of animal rights.  

I do insist that the local disappearance or global extinction of an entire species or genera represents a disaster and threat of a much greater magnitude and scale than the pain or death even of many individual animals. (One reason is that an a single extinction can have multiple, complex cascading effects on many other species, transforming or even bringing about the collapse of entire ecosystems.) And I ask that you refrain from trying to conflate the animal rights agenda with environmentalism, or indeed from any action intended weaken or undermine environmentalism now or in the future.

By its nature, the core mission of environmentalism - protecting populations and species from disappearance and extinction - is qualitatively different from the moral campaign to eliminate killing and consumption of animals and prevent other forms of animal cruelty.  Responsibility for promoting animal rights lies with animal rights activists, not environmentalists.

Contrary to your claim, environmentalism does not "need to confront directly the treatment of animals and issues of animal rights, no more than it needs to confront directly many other pressing and important issues which nonetheless remain external to the environmental movement's core concerns (such as childhood blindness, female mutilation, ending terrorism, or finding a cure for malaria).  It does not demean any of these causes, including yours, to say hey are not intrinsic parts of environmentalism per se, however important they may be,

In the first sentences of your submission, you endorsed the charge of  hypocrisy against people "in the environmental movement who oppose whaling while at the same time tacitly supporting other forms of animal slaughter, which in essence are no less morally offensive."   Hypocrisy is a very strong word in my lexicon, one I hope you would reconsider, along with relevance of your science fiction allegory about space creatures hunting humans with harpoons.  (Harlan Ellison did this sort of thing better.)   In fact, you have failed to articulate any coherent arguments supporting your assertion that killing and eating any animal is intrinsically (and equally) immoral, nor have you addressed the obvious questions raised.  

One question relates to the ubiquity of predation as a life strategy among living creatures over millions of years.  Do lions sin when they hunt and kill?  Sharks?  A single-celled protozoan? What about a well-fed domestic tabby cat, whose killing of "wild" game in your backyard is no more "necessary" than the sport kill of a weekend deer hunter?

Alternatively, if animals (or at least animals other than hominids) are not morally reprehensible for killing their prey, then do we, as humans, bear responsibility for allowing animal predation in the wild to continue?  Could a moral case be made that environmentalists are ethically bound to facilitate the rapid extermination and extinction of predators everywhere in the wild?  One hopes not, but an environmentalism that uncritically absorbed the moral tenets of the animal rights campaign might find that it isn't easy to dismiss absurd arguments such as this.  

Our own history as a species over the past 200,000 years is an evolutionary success story inseparable from the extraordinary capabilities we acquired as cooperative, skilled, tool-using hunters.  Among our first and most revolutionary tools were weapons designed to kill at a distance.  We may decry the transformative effects these and other human inventions had on the world if we so wish, but predation was never really an option or a moral choice for our earliest ancestors on the African savannah.  If predation was ok for early hominids and remains ok for lions, but not for modern humans, then when in our evolutionary history did meat eating suddenly become morally wrong?  

I raise these objections not to denigrate the campaign against animal cruelty (some concerns of which I personally share)  but simply to emphasize that its issues are its own. The animal cruelty movement does not share common issues with environmentalism, nor does it participate in the movement's scientific, philosophical or even its moral underpinnings.  An unthinking impulse to inject the moral tenets and the agenda of the campaign for animal rights into environmentalism can only narrow the base of support for environmental objectives and damage our necessary efforts to protect habitats and biodiversity.

Frogfish {Robert Delfs}