Meatless dinner parties

Melissa Clark, writing in the NY Times, has a nice essay about meatless dinner parties.

Creating competition to stimulate environmental legislation

Here’s a really interesting claim by E. Donald Elliot (www.eli.org).  Writing in the September/October 2011 issue of “The Environmental Forum” he claims that

“Environmentalists have made three tactical mistakes of historic proportions since 1990.  First, they have consistently supported Democrats, thereby undermining the competition between the two parties on environmental issues that characterized the more productive 1970 to 1992 period.  Second, they have focused almost exclusively on climate change, thereby sucking the oxygen out of other issues (such as updating our chemical management system) on which bipartisan progress would have been possible.  And third, they made a tactical blunder of historic proportions by taking the position that climate science was beyond debate, thereby abandoning public discourse in the United States on climate science to the antis.”

Discussion topics:

How can we nudge our politicians to focus on issues common to both ‘sides of the aisle’ and important to all of us?  Elliot suggests that we repeal the 17^th Amendment (direct election of Senators) to break the cycle of electioneering.

Eating quandries

Belize is one of the few places that still has viable populations of queen conch.  I've been swimming by them every day in the seagrass on my commute to the reef.  Today, I swam down and looked one in the eyes (which are found at the tip of eye-stalks that extend out of the bottom of the shell) before putting out my hand and scaring it back into its creamy brown shell.

Trouble is that conch taste good.  Really good. (Google some recipes for conch ceviche for starters!)

Populations throughout the Caribbean have been hunted to local extinction and they are threatened or endangered all over.  Conch poachers are prosecuted.  Conch conservation is touted. 

So what's the problem.  The problem is I wonder if it's ethical to eat them here.

Conservation is often a very local issue.  What's threatened in one location may be abundant in another.  Consider wolves, or grizzly bears:  less common in the lower 48 US States than Canada or Alaska.  It's legal to hunt these magnificent carnivores in Canada and Alaska, but there's much controversy over hunting them in the lower 48.

So, if you know that a fish (or conch, in this case) is mostly endangered, should you eat it from a place where it is not?  Even this is a more complex problem that it may first seem.  

Consider salmon.  You can't make a general statement saying that eating wild salmon is sustainable because many salmon fisheries are not sustainable.  So, it is a bit of a dilemma about making general statements.

And even here, we're clearly not on a marine reserve where they are protected and consequently  I'm not seeing the small conch in sufficient numbers to tell me that this bays population is sustainable. 

So, will I eat them if our captain gets us some (he's a fisherman in addition to the captain of the boat that takes us here and back)?  Yes, I think I will...but only here.

Power Outage: Using less electricity...

If you've been following my Belize saga, let me report that the train stopped, this time, and fortunately.  The wind came up and blew in colder water which drove down the water temperature to the high 80°'s.  Then it started raining (we're in the middle of a large low pressure system that is leading to periodic downpours and squalls).  This has further cooled the water and the coral bleaching has stopped--for now.

But then again, so has the electricity made by our solar panels!  This morning the power went out.  

The marine lab has both a wind turbine and a number of large solar panels to generate electricity.  As we were introduced to the place by the station manager he told us about their conservation ethic.  There are few lights (all compact florescent or florescent) and no hot water (it's not needed).  Fans are used sparingly.  

We did however bring a lot of iPods, speakers, and computers (all required for research--several of my student groups are doing playback experiments to lizards and birds to study communication and predation risk assessment) and some more fans (to keep us cool) and somehow, for the first time in recent history, used up all the power!

Ironically, we're really doing a good job conserving power (using fans sparingly--OK not that sparingly when it felt like 100°F, but generally sparingly, using few lights) so this is a real wake-up to me and is a wake-up call to the power that computers and fans can use!

Discussion Topic

What, if anything, are you doing to conserve power?  What can you easily do to use even less?  Have you thought about solar panels?  How would they work to help you generate power?  How would you use power if you were generating it all yourself.

What is necessary for people to change?

The word that we use the most in environmental discussion is “change”. People have to change the way they perceive things, change their attitude towards the environment, change the way they use resources, change many things. Change seems to be a magic word. But if things were so easy, we would be living in an almost perfect world.

Changing habits is one of the most difficult things a person can do. Sometimes we don’t change because we don’t want to lose comfort, because we’re quite lazy, or we’re afraid of what can happen. Maybe we don’t change because we are used to so many good things and never tried to live without them.

Irvin Yalom wrote about change in his interesting book Staring at the Sun. The book is about how people perceive death, and how it can change their lives. When people face what Yalom calls an “awakening experience”, they start to see life in a different way. An awakening experience can be the loss of a loved-one, the breakup of an intimate relationship, a trauma, an illness, the loss of a job, retirement, and other situations in which the person seems to lose control of his or her life. To help overcoming this kind of situation, some people start doing what they thought was necessary before, but they never did, maybe because of the reasons written above. Some people donate their time, and money, to help other people and animals, some of them help environmental organizations, some stop eating meat, some get involved in politics, and so on.

We always hear about a person who changed his or her life suddenly because of an awakening experience (to see recent examples of that, click here, and here). No one has any doubt that a way to change one’s life is having a hard time. Being aware of that, we may think: is it really necessary to wait for such experiences to behave differently? Why not start doing today what we always thought to be the best for us, for other people, and for the environment?

Questions for discussion: Do you have something you’ve always wanted to do regarding environmental issues? Are you motivated to change?

Adaptation or plastic pollution? Not really a question!

All species of hermit crabs must find their shells and the Caribbean terrestrial hermit crabs seemingly prefer the shells from Turbo, a type of snail.  On the remote Caye in Belize where our field course is based there are not many Turbo shells.  But, since the Caye was hit by a hurricane a year ago, there is a LOT of plastic pollution.  

This little fella found a piece of plastic to use as it's shell. 

Adaptive behavior?  Perhaps; as it grows it will shed it for a larger shell which hopefully won't be plastic!

A tragic sign of our times?  Certainly.  The plastic pollution comes from humans after all and marine life is being killed by it.  The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a result of human trash getting into the ocean and this plastic (and chemical) trash has only deleterious effects on marine life.  

We can do something about this!  Check out the Plastic Pollution Coalition and do your best to reduce, reuse, recycle and refuse plastics when out shopping.  The crabs may not be happy but the rest of the marine life will.

Increasing civility by writing letters

A friend and colleague just found a long-lost letter I had written him when he was an undergraduate and I was working on my dissertation research in Pakistan, which he scanned it and sent to me.  Neither of us remembered our initial meeting in 1988, nor the correspondence. 

Apparently he had asked me about coming to join me as an assistant.  And, in polite prose, I responded about what it would take.  He ended up not joining me and evolved into an award winning tropical biologist.  It’s tempting to wonder what career trajectory he would have taken had he joined me for a summer in Pakistan.

Only many years later, did we reconnect (not that either of us remembered connecting in the first place) and I’m delighted when he comes and teaches at the field station where I spend my summers because we get to hang out.

The striking thing about this letters is how different it is from my typical emails these days.  Now, I typically write early hominid emails; you know, a few grunts and groans, perhaps a pleasantry or two, but not real prose.  Not polite, civil prose.

It has become even worse now that I respond to a lot of my email on a smart phone where typing comes with costs.

Here’s a thought experiment:  what if we slowed down and fully responded to folks with polite letters?  Do you think this would be a way to enhance civility and civil discourse?  I don’t know, but it’s worth a try!