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Why are we such suckers when it comes to electric cars? All we are really going to do is plug it into an electric wall socket so that the fossil-fueled power station at the other end of that wire can pump the same amount of – if not more – greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
Haven’t we realised that the car makers are laughing all the way to the bank?
In today’s print edition of the Daily Yomiuri Hiroko Ota, Japanese state minister in charge of economic and fiscal policy, is quoted as saying on Wednesday, Japan must reform its labour market in order to continue growth and increase its productivity in order to compensate for its aging and low birth-rate society. The comments were made during a discussion with Edward Lazear and Matthew Slaughter, both members of US Council of Economic Advisors.
But really should not this be an opportunity to show responsibility for ecological sustainablility by not producing and consuming more, but rather to reduce? While I understand the concern that it is important to maintain the nation’s standard of living this should not be a time to increase it. There is nothing to say that a shrinking economy moving in line with a shrinking population means a lowering of the standard of living. As long as productivity per capita is maintained then increased productivity would be unnecessary and therefore should not be the aim.
In our time of need for global environmental responsibility the government rhetoric should reflect this in their goals and actions. A missed chance for leadership in this area. It is a shame, really. How silly to talk of growth when everything else in the country is shrinking.
My wife wrote my mother, who lives in Australia, a letter. She wrote about how warm it has been in Japan this winter, about how glad she is it hadn’t been too cold. I asked her if she knew just how bad a sign that is for our future. She said she knew but she still preferred warm weather.
I told her we could move to Malaysia but then, eventually, we would have to move back here to the mountains of Japan because the weather in a half century’s time would be what Malaysia is like now.
“I still prefer the warm weather,” she insisted.
You really can’t argue with logic like that.
The Japanese Environment Ministry has opened a 10 person panel of experts to discuss the definition and the process of designation of coastal and other water areas as “sea santuaries”. This comes after a 1992 study found that over ten percent of tidal land in Japan have been lost since 1976 and about three percent of marine forest has also been lost in the same period.
The article only gives these dates. But I would not be surpised if these are the latest figures. It usually takes about 10 years for the Japan government to act on any approved proposal. That means any action from this panel will probably only take effect in 2017 at the earliest. You can call me cynical but must also call me a realist.
Click here to read the full article from Daily Yomiuri.
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The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has decided to endorse that cloned food is safe. If given the go ahead FDA will allow the sale of cloned cattle, pig and goat, but not sheep, pending comments over the next three months and final approval.
But is cloned food really safe?
Sure, the direct result is just a cow, a pig, or a goat. But, surely, there must be a reason why nature “chooses” to make every single organism across species as well as within species different.
2.
This reminds me of the Borg Collective in Star Trek: The Next Generation. If one central area is attacked successfully the whole system collapses. That is not so far fetched. We have examples in our modern world. Disease is one.
Take Aids, for example. It is a virus which knows how to bypass the body’s defences. But not everyone is susceptible to the disease. You may be a Aids carrier but may not be HIV positive. In other words, variation helped contain Aids in this instance.
Variation in life has this important function. It simply means we react or relate differently to the same conditions. On the biological level this has saved us from completely being wiped out.
3.
Rat plagues work in the same way. I once watched an old Eastern European television documentary on a rat exterminator. He gave a step-by-step psychological guide to the rat socio-structure. There is always one rat which is smarter, or less trustful of the exterminator’s method. Literally. this man would feed the rats right out of his hand. He gained the trust of the rats infesting a farm. Once they trust has been created he begins to feed them rat poison out of his hand. But the rats ate the poison becuase of the established trust. Even as the other rats around them were dying the rats continued to accept the “food”. The remaining handful of rats which were cautious to his “gifts” were then killed with a rifle. In this way he was able to exterminate an entire rat population that had taken over a farm property. If some were left behind this would be disastrous because you then have supersmart, superwise rats the next time around.
4.
But coming back to cloned food, why are we in such a hurry to sell it? Are we in some kind of meat shortage that I do not know about? It seems it is all about money, and nothing else.
Why are we always trying to play God? Make yourself heard that you don’t want cloned food before it is too late, especially if you are an American citizen.
Don’t forget to have your say over the next three months with the FDA.
My father came to visit recently. As a habit we try to see each other once a year. As he works for a multinational company he is always on the move flying around globetrotting to meetings. So getting together for a couple of days is usually all we can manage.
This also means he is very much a person who believes in business as a way of life. His business life is something I am not particularly fond of. Personally I want to be a teacher or academic even though these jobs are not without its own politics. It is really a pick from a bad bunch of livelihoods.
So it is during these couples of days that I get to talk to (read: argue with) him about business ethics and philosophy. This time we talked about the relationship between science and sustainability. We agreed that global warming that is happening right now and that something needs to give. However he believed science will create new technologies which have less impact on the environment, that it will eventually save the planet from death by consumerism.
And it is this belief in science that we differ.
To me there are two types of scientists – Observers and Manipulators. To the Observer science is a tool for investigating the nature of the universe. Observers want to know the fundamental laws of motion. So they invent things like calculus and telescopes to gain this knowledge. The object of their investigation is the world. It is to be looked at, to be learned from and to be understood. Observers do not touch the object that is under investigation. By contrast to the Manipulator science is a tool for tampering with the very nature of the universe. The Manipulator wants to know how much they can get out of the world. So they create things like machines for mass production and the electric light bulb for personal, and often short-term, gain. The objective of their investigation is to find ways to apply their knowledge for gain and to see how efficiently something can be produced for consumption. To the Manipulator the world is to be played with, to be harnessed and harvested, to be made a slave of its technological master.
Observers are the astronomers, the oceanographers, the meteorologists of this world; Manipulators are the research scientists, the inventors, the designers of this same world. So it is really a choice as to how we want to relate to the environment, what we choose to do with it or to do to it.
I believe that much of our problems are from the application of science in the form of technology, and that it has snowballed into something bigger because we have tried to use more science to solve these problems. So the advent of science is akin to opening Pandora’s Box or starting a vicous circle. While both seem to imply we cannot reverse the course, I do not believe science’s blunders are irreversible. It may be difficult but not impossible. And certainly using less technology and reverting to a simpler lifestyle will help.
So whether science will save the environment really depends on when we will listen to the Observers over the Manipulators. By nature Observers are the silent type and Manipulators are the loud type, and so their seems to be only ever one discourse – that of the Manipulator. This seems to mean it is not only important for the Observers to scream their silent scream as loudly as they can, but also for us to be listening for it.
Recently I had to evaluate a writing textbook for my Teaching Writing class. It was a textbook for teaching English writing to second language students for academic purposes. So the articles were all social related.
The chapter I chose to examine was called Our Earth, Our Resources, Our Environment., a chapter obviously about sustainability issues. Yet the title struck me as problematic. Not that the Earth the resources and the environment are unimportant words (they are undoubtedly “trend words” for today) but it was how they were determined. The other three words or to be exact the other word repeated three times – our – was just begging for criticism.
Of the three possessive cases that occurred in this short “punchy” title resources stood out for me. What are resources and who owns them? These are questions I would like to answer here. The Oxford English Minidictionary on my desk defines resource as “a supply of an asset to be used when needed”. A fair and straightforward definition. But what about the assumptions of the word. The use of the words supply and asset are interesting here because they are not words usually associated with the environment, especially the protection of it.
And what about the verb form? It is in the passive. Passive sentences have a feature which make it a favourite of some writers because of what it can hide or ignore – the doer. To complete the definition it omits the doer partly because it is assumed and partly because it wants to obscure its negative impact. Let me put it another way: I do not know of too many animals that see the trees and mountains as “supply”, “asset” or “resource”. These are wholly human terms.
Habitat may be a better word to describe the areas we term resource. But that too has its problems. It is always “the dwarf mongooses’ habitat” or simply “their habitat”. usually it is not an area human inhabit but always a step removed from, or to look at from the outside. In other words, it is the The Other world or place and not ours.
About five minutes drive from my home is a quarry. I literally drive through it almost everyday to get to and from college. Every time I do so I shudder. Slowly what once was a mountain, a forest and habitat for animals is now bare yellow sandy rock. The huge bulldozers power shovels and dump trucks that sit by the roadside has gradually been transported away to some factory somewhere for use, for human consumption. The mountain face that once dominated my peripheral vision as I drive now opens up to a dusty sky. How sad. I wonder if the workers don’t feel any loss by this. I do. But I guess it represents food on the table for them.
Last year I wrote a very short piece about Proudon’s famous statement “property is theft”. In this piece I deconstructed the term property and turned it on to itself, saying we are really stealing from ourselves. I still feel the same way now but I must qualify it. Not that I am an anarchist or believe in anarchy (not in the popular meaning of the word anyway), rather the things in the environment do not belong solely to us, the human species.
Animals, I feel, have the right to the use and protect their home and the place which feeds them. This may be a mountain or a forest, the very place we call a resource, our resource. Yet they literally do not have representation. Animal rights groups may attempt to speak for them but it may seem – to the other on the other side of the fence – futile and naive to try to protect them.
It reminds me of the scene in Seven Years in Tibet where the monks were shown spending an entire week removing all the worms they could find from a plot of land being prepared for a new building. This was so they do not harm life or kill. Jainism, another religion that developed in India practices similarly.
And it is this fundamental respect for life – that is lacking in Western thinking, economy, politics, philosophy, etc – that I would like to point out.
When I was in 21 I became a monk. In preparation for my move I sold everything I had. At first the lack of possession was rather unsettling but I slowly felt liberated by the loss of the burden toward my things. I do not know when but I had come to understand why Buddha taught this way of living and what it means to be living as a monk.
Once I had renounced possessions once I felt I did not need to have more. Nor do I feel nowadays the sense of loss when something is taken or given away. I now question whether it is really necessary for me to have something before I buy or receive it. And I look at the mountains not as something for me to enjoy but that the joy given to me is by its grace and its non-possession of me.
I have just started a course on the understanding of the natural environment. In it we are to given firsthand experience in observing what nature not just in the photographs or in the classroom. The aim of the class is also to show how to make our own instruments for the observation of natural phenomenon.
After the class and during the long drive home I recalled a question that has been puzzling me for two years now – what is the natural environment? It seems to me that every time we talk about the natural environment we talk about it without us – human beings – being involved in it. But are we not a product of the environment? Are we not really just another animal within the animal kingdom?
Sure we separate ourselves from the rest of the animal world. The binary opposites we, humans, use is animal and human. And with these terms we pretend to be rulers of some sort. Our practices show that we feel we have the right to choose how animals live (or die). We simply rank ourselves higher than the animals over whom we believe we own. In short, the world is our slave and property.
This is not new of course. Animal rights as a movement has already pointed this out. Animal testing is a contradiction in itself – the use of animals is justified they are similar enough to us (humans) to make the results valid, yet they are different enough from us (humans) to consider it not cruel to do the types of experiments we wouldn’t do to other humans in the first place. So which is it?
Assuming we are just another animal within the web of life, not one that is at its pinnacle, but one that is only one part of it. So what are we doing to this web and what is our role within this system? If we are to take our present way of living as an indicator then we are like a cancer. Ecosystems generally try to reach a self-sustaining mode. But humans try to destroy as much as possible for the sake of things called economy and nation. Sustainability seems to be the last thing on the minds of economies and nationhood, seeing not the larger picture but choosing a narrow view of life.
One has to ask are we higher creatures or just shortsighted animals within a capacity to not only deceive others but ourselves also? Or perhaps this is nature’s way of culling planetary overpopulation, or if you are religiously inclined God’s sick sense of humour.
You know the problem with greenhouse gas emissions and laws like the one passed by Governor Schwarzenegger is not that there aren’t people like him willing to do it but rather the process to see it through is a difficult one if not down right impossible. The BBC article raised two really good points about why it may not work.
Firstly, the rest of the US states and the federal bureaucrats must follow suit in order to have any effect. This is a big “if” which seems unlikely. The self-interest of America will always come first. And when George W Bush says it will hurt the economy the American public will believe him.
The second problem is that – according to the BBC again – is that those businesses which will be hurt by the law will simply pack up and go somewhere friendlier to their philosophy. That is why I do not see it making a big difference to the cause.
I may sound pessimistic but that has happened all too often before. And there is nothing different to this law being passed and other attempts like it.
So what is the solution? I do not know. But I know this much – our political practices must change. I do not know exactly what kind of political system needs to replace it (if it exists at all) but I know only it isn’t the one we have now. In short I am saying we need a new political paradigm.
Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Governor of California, has signed a law to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the first US state to do so. This is in direct conflict with current White House policy which sees any reduction being detrimental to its economy. Governor Schwarzenegger who like President Bush is a Republican. The law aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 25% before 2020.
British prime minister Tony Blair has praised the law saying “[it] will echo right around the rest of the world”.
And that is exactly what we will have to wait for. California alone cannot fix the problem but if other US states follow suit then we may see realistic reductions. America is still one of the highest in output greenhouse gases. So any kind of lead by them will truly echo around the world.
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