Want to see dolphins up close? You won’t, after this…

•September 29, 2009 • Leave a Comment

This is going to be short and to the point (for me, anyway): I saw a heartbreaking documentary this weekend, called “The Cove”.  It is about a Japanese village called Taiji that carries out an incredibly cruel annual dolphin roundup, sale and slaughter (which is going on NOW– it starts September 1st, though they started about  a week late this year, due to all the media attention from the film).  You need to see this film: here is the trailer…

The Cove Movie: Welcome.

The “dolphin fishermen” use a method of acoustical torture to drive the dolphins into a cove: a fleet of boats line up and lowers metal rods into the water, which the fisherman bang on to create a wall of sound that causes the dolphins incredible pain and even permanent auditory damage (they have incredibly sensitive hearing, so they can detect their own echolocation sounds).

As the animals flee from the source of the sound (and pain), they are driven by the “sound wall” into a cove, from which they will never return to the sea again.  Once the dolphins are driven in close enough to the shore, nets are deployed to keep them captive.

In the first “round”, buyers for the world’s seaquariums and marine animal parks (they are ALL involved, directly or indirectly) choose the most “promising dolphins” and pay about $150,ooo for each of them.  Though they will never be free or see their families (called a pod) again, these are the lucky dolphins.

The rest of them will be slaughtered…. over 20,000 of them each season.

You cannot appreciate the horror of this process unless you see “The Cove” (or related video) for yourself.  The animals are held in the main net, until it is their turn to be driven around the next bend into the “killing cove”, where fishermen stab them to death using spear-poles.  Individuals animals may be stabbed many, many times before they finally die.  The water turns so red, it looks like pure blood.  It is unfathomably awful and heart-rending to watch.

And then, you have to think about this from the dolphins’ perspective.  As a neuroscience grad student (way back when…), I saw a dolphin brain and a human brain, side by side.  There is NO question that dolphins are as intelligent, and possibly more so, than humans.

But, just assume for now that dolphins = humans, in terms of intelligence and family bonding.  Imagine yourself and your family in this situation: you would be separated in the panic, but maybe you could hear your loved ones– your children!– crying out in distress, but you wouldn’t be able to do anything, except maybe call back to them.  You would smell the blood in the water, and KNOW that your life and the lives of your family were in danger, but you would be powerless.  Just let your mind work on the details of the horror of this for a while…

So, how do WE stop this?  There is no us and them, anymore.  Yes, it is the Japanese fishermen in Taiji who are carrying out this brutal atrocity RIGHT NOW, if you are reading this in September.  But, why do they do it?

MONEY.  Dolphins = dollars (yes, I know, yen…).

The sale of dolphins for dolphin shows and swim-with-the-dolphins businesses around the world funds dolphin slaughter.  So, STOP GOING TO DOLPHIN SHOWS!  Stop going to ANY PLACE that has dolphin shows!  Do NOT swim with captive dolphins!  Do NOT pay to see captive dolphins.  If you do, YOU are supporting the Taiji dolphin slaughter… and others like it. Continue reading ‘Want to see dolphins up close? You won’t, after this…’

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I’d like you to meet my friend, IPAT. Part 1: P is for Population.

•September 7, 2009 • Leave a Comment

If we want to understand how to help solve (or at least mitigate) our global “ecodestruction” problem, we need to know a teensy bit of ecology.   The incredible thing is that there is one simple equation that gives us the big picture.  Fabulous!

We call this gorgeous thing IPAT:

Impact = Population x Affluence  x Technology

So, seriously, you are supposed to be impressed by an ecology equation, of all things?  Yes!  Because it tells us there are only THREE things we can do to lessen our eco-impact:

  1. Shrink our population
  2. Consume less stuff
  3. Find tech solutions to minimize the impact of our consumption

With the problem now described so elegantly in these three little terms, we have to face facts.   Just three of them, but it ain’t going to be easy…   The only way to shrink our population is to decrease our net reproduction.  Deaths – Births = Net reproduction.

So, let’s recap: more of us need to die, or fewer children need to be born?  Holy crap (or feces, if you prefer).

This is not a nice fact, but fact it is.  Obviously, I am not advocating taking anyone out, but when I see Jon and Kate Plus 8 and the Octomom and all the other reality-show “baby machines”, I do have to scream a little, on the inside…

The simple truth is that we live on a finite ball of rock we call Earth, but our population just keeps growing and growing.  This is an untenable situation…

Since our home is NOT growing, we’ve got what we’ve got, resource-wise.  [I can just imagine some Exxon geochemist's head exploding as they read this.]  So, how many of us can the Earth really support for the long haul (this is called carrying capacity)?

If you find this topic disturbing, you are not alone: even ecologists don’t like to discuss it.  In fact, if you ever wanted to clear a roomful of ecologists really fast, you could just yell “What is the carrying capacity of Earth for Homo sapiens?”  Voila!  You’ve got the room (and maybe an open bar, if you’re lucky) to yourself.

No one likes the idea that there is a carrying capacity of Earth for humans.  I looked and looked for information about this when I was in grad school, and could not find anything solid.  So, I did a rough calculation of of it myself (yes, I am a science geek…) and came up with this scary result: 1.5 to 15 billion.  And then one of my profs (thanks, Dr, Pilson!) said there was no way the number could be more than around 10 billion.

Is that you I hear gasping, gentle reader?…a perfectly sensible reaction: this *is* scary.  There are almost 7 billion of us already, up from 6 billion in 1999.  http://www.census.gov/main/www/popclock.html

The newest models for population growth project that we will grow to around 9 billion in ~2050, and then decrease from there.  Yay!  Time to heave a sigh of relief, right?

Wrong… population decrease means lots of people will be dying from lack of resources, since the models cannot possibly assume we will stop wanting to have babies.  We like having babies.  (Or do we mainly like having sex?… hmm… great topic for another time.)

So, what can we do?  Well, we can either tackle this population problem now, with only 7 billion of us to convince to voluntarily limit our reproduction, or…

[drumroll, please]

We take what’s behind door #2:  9 billion of us at war for a dwindling pool of resources, being killed off in frightening numbers by each other and a planet that cannot support all of us.

While bacteria always go with option #2, I think we might be able to do a little better than that, don’t you?

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