Earthflight

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The recent natural history series Earthflight has been interesting to watch.

It follows birds as they fly around the planet, the sort of thing the BBC have done many times. Only this time the idea is to take the bird’s eye view.

And it is amazing where advances in digital, miniaturization and lens technology can take us. Some of the shots would have been unthinkable even a decade ago.

Here is my quick synopsis. Truly staggering photography is spoilt by gratuitous segways (usually to footage of large ferocious animals other than birds) and an inane sales copy narrative. But, hey, not every audience wants to hear Sir David all the time.

The images are so amazing that figuring out how they did it takes the mind away from what the bird sees.

Maybe it is a bit like the experience with flight simulator games. We know we cannot be up in the air because we are holding a game console and so part of us stays attached to that reality. It was similar with images of flight.

My brain said that it was not possible to be 1,000 feet up gliding on thermals across an Andean mountain top and so I did not see the landscape below as the condor might, even though the camera was right there on its back (at least that’s what we are supposed to think is how it was done – I have my doubts).

The footage I remember though was taken in conventional fashion. It was of 40 or so Andean condors chattering around a carcass at the end of a landfill site on the outskirts of Santiago. The narrator tells us that the carcass is provided for the birds so that they are not at risk from the bulldozers that are spreading out the garbage.

It was not so long ago that the Andean condor was classified as an endangered species by the IUCN. It is better off today with a near threatened classification,  but remains susceptible to human influence.

Only here were 40 individuals on a rubbish tip. And this is a good thing?

I’ll leave you to decide.

 

 

Wot, no politics

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It was a momentous day in 1990 when the Australian government decided to permit the broadcast of proceedings in the Australian parliament on free-to-air television.

Since then it has been possible for the electorate to see first hand what elected members get up to in their day jobs.

We can all follow the procedure, the tradition, the ceremony, the banter, the heckling, the bad behaviour, the nodding off after lunch, and the politics.

It is the last bit that interests me.

Tune in to question time and you will see the government field questions on where it stands on the issues of the day. The opposition will poke and prod to unearth the truth, the philosophy that underpins the position. This they will then undermine and deride to make their alternative position seem so much more sensible.

In return the government will fire back proclaiming the logic of their stance and how the alternatives will surely fail.

In short, there will be debate.

And debate will help us all understand the options and form our own opinion. Those of us not able or foolish enough to take in question time live will be able to get a potted summary in the weekend editorials or a sound bite on the news, maybe even head to the blogosphere to see what everyone else thinks.

So what happens when, back in the chamber, you are so afraid of your philosophical position you bury it so far back in your mind that after a while you easily forget what it is.

You now have nothing to defend. No philosophical foundation on which to argue the issue; no weapons or ammunition for a verbal fight and no empathy, compassion or understanding if enlightenment is your gig. You have nothing.

And there is no debate.

Tune in to question time today and what you will witness is a slanging match over nothing more than personality and procedure.

It is simply too painful to watch.

Zoological gardens

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Earlier I posted a somewhat acerbic commentary on gardens.

In brief it concluded that we must have them even though we don’t really use them. I am curious to know if the same thought process could be applied to zoological gardens.

Zoos began as collections, or more strictly, menageries.

Some of the wealthy and idle rich, who often liked to collect things, developed a fascination for animals and started to collect them. The more weird, more wonderful, and wilder the better.

It is not hard to imagine the independently wealthy of the early industrial era with access to travel on the new steam ships and trains wandering off to see the wondrous wildlife of Africa, all hurrahs, what ho’s, and gin and tonics. Once they were done with shooting the lions, buffalo, elephants, rhino and leopards it was inevitable that they would want some in their copious back yards at home

It probably started with taxidermy they had done on all the trophies. But stuffed didn’t quite cut if you could have a roaring lion the other side of the rose garden.

Plus, if you could have a botanical garden, then why not a zoological garden?

So live animals became the go and menageries an inevitable consequence of wealth and travel.

And for a long while these were private collections, places where the privileged few showed off their latest acquisitions to a handful of their friends and guests. Even today, the majority of the exotic creatures held in captivity are in private collections.

Only later did the fascination spread to the general public and the notion that there might be a buck in showing the weird and wonderful to the masses.

If you have been fortunate enough to witness wildlife in the wild then even the best zoo is an anathema. You know there is something about a cage, enclosure, display (the noun choice cannot really hide the reality) that strips the zoo animal of its essence.

It does not matter that most animals are not aware of their situation as captives or that a well run zoo is no more cruel than keeping a dog or a cat at home.

And that even all the zoos in the world hold a miniscule fraction of the extant specimens of all but the rarest species. The number of captives is a blip. What is a few hundred elephants when there are hundreds of thousands still alive in the wild?

Then there are the well-rehearsed reasons in favour; various expansions on themes of

  • education
  • conservation
  • preservation
  • enjoyment value

And these all have merit.

The concern I have is an impression that we have not stretched these themes far enough.  Especially to the importance of maintaining viable wild populations of the species that we like to exhibit.

Whilst I find a trip to the local zoo to stand and admire a zebra, giraffe and even a tubby lion rewarding, I cannot escape this feeling that something’s missing.

Gardens

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A garden is a place that humans create from nature.

We carve out a parcel of land around our dwelling, add some landscaping and select plants to display nature’s beauty and bounty. This orderliness of things is pleasing to us. We feel in control as though our effort has tamed the wilderness.

The cleared patch puts some space between our homes, allows us to potter around outside without bumping into the dangers that trigger our fight and flight response and even provides fresh lettuce for a salad.

The first gardens were probably about clearing the vegetation around the hut so that we would not step on an unseen snake and the water would drain away more easily.

Most of us have or would like a small garden, our own small patch of tamed tranquility. We also enjoy visits to grander spaces that surround opulent homes for a garden is also a statement. It says something about the owner.

These spaces are so important to us that when we allow half the land area in the suburbs of many of our cities to be gardens. This makes our cities bigger, city infrastructure more expensive, and our commutes longer.

So why is it that with all these good reasons and commitment to have a garden we actually don’t spend that much time in them?

Obviously during the week we are at work and our kids are at school so we cannot be in two places at once. Then there is homework, the newspaper or TV, and dinner to prepare. At weekends we have shopping and sports and, well, a whole bunch of things to do.

There is some gardening of course; only this is mostly to keep the garden looking good.

And then you can’t be in the garden in the rain.

Take away all the effort in upkeep and we hardly spend any time in the garden at all. Only the kids use it and for them it is an attractive space until they get to high school when other things tweak their interest or the space is just too small for real soccer.

There must be another reason for our love affair.

It could be because all we need is to see evidence of our personal control over nature. A garden is a space close to us that we (or perhaps the landscaper) have tamed and bent to our will if you like. It is a safe buffer between the real world and us.

And yes, we like that space to be beautiful. We like to select and display selections from nature that we especially like or on occasion might even want to eat. Most of all we want it to look good simply because looking at it is what we will do most.

Perhaps it is OK that we do this, that we create this visual buffer. Especially if when we get a spare moment and its not raining we wander around the garden or just sit in it, maybe even on the grass. Maybe we are now so removed from nature that it really is too much for us to be exposed directly to its real tooth and claw and that our modifications of nature are a necessary half way house.

My guess is that these days, gardens get looked at only occasionally and entered for their own sake very rarely. When I travel on the train to the city, a journey of 60km each way, I can count on one hand the times I have seen people in their gardens.

So maybe gardens are actually about that neighbour thing.

Perhaps they are there to demonstrate how wealthy we are. It explains why when we look to buy a house, the size and shape of the garden around it is so important to our purchasing decision.

It would be better if we actually spent more time in our gardens, just because we can.

 

Labour leaders

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At this time of confusion over political leaders in Australia that highlights a frightening vacuum in leadership, I though I might point back to a post from last year entitled Don’t argue the mechanism, set the target.

It hints at why the Australian Labour Party finds itself in such a mess today and at why, when the Liberals return, they will show themselves to be equally disheveled.

What will it take for real opinion to spark real debate to result in real policy?

Answers on a postcard to….

 

Timescales

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Thought I might share this passage from page 393 of Ian Plimer’s book Heaven and Earth.

On a scale of 500 years the planet is warming after the Little Ice Age 500 years ago.

On a scale of 5,000 years there have been many periods of warming and cooling.

On a scale of 5,000,000 years there have been numerous periods of intense cold and many short periods of warmth.

The average global temperature over the past 2.67 million years is less than the current global temperature. Why? Because we are living in the Pleistocene glaciation which has not yet run its full course.

This logic is sound.

Plimer’s cogent argument is that on geological timeframes the climate has been both hotter and significantly cooler than at present and that to really understand climate change, it is geological time that provides the best context and insight.

The earth is, after all, very old leaving plenty of time and opportunity for a range of climate conditions everywhere. It is hard to imagine that not so long ago in geological terms the current continents were in a very different configuration, that in an epoch mountains can form and erode away, and all the time sediments form and are consumed into the mantle of the earth at plate margins.

It is the rare the talent of the geologist to think on the time scales that matter to the formation of sediment, rocks and ore bodies.

What is interesting is to map global human population size onto the points in time that Pilmer quotes to illustrate his understanding of climate change.

For this purpose ‘human’ means both the species Homo sapiens that first appeared around 250,000 years ago and the genus Homo that the fossil record suggests has been present as various species since around 2.3 million years ago.

  • 500 years ago after the Little Ice Age at 1500 AD there were 500 million humans. This is roughly the present day population of the United States and Indonesia combined, 7% of the current global total.
  • 5,000 years ago there were just 5 million humans, or roughly the population of present day Finland and today there are over 100 countries with more people than Finland.  At the advent of agriculture 10,000 years ago there were perhaps 1 million H. sapiens.
  • Around 70,000 years ago there is genetic evidence that H. sapiens went through a population bottleneck when for some reason, perhaps the eruption of the supervolcano Toba in Indonesia, numbers went as low as 15,000 individuals.
  • 5,000,000 years ago there were no recognizable humans.

Calculations suggest that there may have been 110 billion humans that have ever lived and a full 6% of them are alive today. Human population growth is an explosion in comparison to geological time.

So when discussion stalls on the causes of climate change or even on its existence, it is worth remembering that the real challenge for humans is to handle the resource needs of 7 billion souls alive today, the 6% of those that have ever lived, without destroying the resource use opportunity for the descendents of this 7 billion.

This is, of course, the standard definition of sustainable development.

It would be a shame if we forgot about sustainable development to focus on the latest fad that, if we think about it on the time scale of the geologists, we can do little about.

 

 

Environmental issues for real – Environmentalism

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We should find news footage of men and women in orange jump suits slashing with scythes at genetically modified crops disturbing.

And what was our response when the taxpayer foots the bill to “rescue” activists who board whaling vessels?

I was always told that the end cannot justify the means. Clearly it is not that simple.

Read my latest Ezine@rticle to see why environmentalism might be an environmental issue.

A food security challenge

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I have been writing a few articles lately about food.

Oddly not in the culinary sense, given the profusion of cooking shows and what seems like an exponential growth in the number of celebrity chefs.

I am more interested in ‘How we will grow enough food‘ and whether we can cope with a global dietary change given ‘What we eat‘.

An observation made by a friend of mine who recently retired from a distinguished career as a public servant in agriculture and natural resource management gave me pause.

After observing the agricultural community in Australia for several decades his comment was that farmers take up practices that improve productivity and sustainability when times are good.

When it’s tough they just do what it takes to stay viable.

The implication of this logical and insightful observation is that future food production is dependent on how well farmers are doing now, in the immediate.

Those of us who get our food from commercial agricultural production (nearly everyone in agricultural economies) have become quite used to highly reliable food quality, variety and supply. And to keep the supply consistent the farmers relax and adopt sustainable practices when the weather is good and the seasons have behaved.

The likely response to drought, flood, frost and heat waves, or soil degradation is do what you can to get some kind of crop to market. This is because the market demand requires it and, as a business, the farm must at least cover its costs or it goes out of business.

The same response occurs when input costs rise. Do what you can to keep the business viable. In short, get some product to market.

This understandable response is a food security challenge, especially where the bulk of food production comes from the small to medium size businesses that we call farms.

If farm viability is so important to both the market and the individual business then there is little to stop exploitative practices when times are tough. At the margins risks will be taken just to keep the business going; because the alternative is the businesses go under. We do it in manufacturing, retail and service sectors so it should be no surprise that we do it in agriculture.

We will save the government subsidy issue for later. What we might think about is the challenge to good practice presented when times are hard.

The reality is that good practice will only be good if it results in some buffering of economic returns when times are tough. Sustainable practices are those that keep inputs to a minimum, make optimal use of the conditions even when its warm and doesn’t rain, and end up with some salable produce.

Where this is not possible, then the farm ceases to be a business. And given that in our current model we buy almost all our food, business failure makes food supply far less secure.

 

 

No valentine

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If you are an environmentalist it is a scary thing to call anything natural an asset. This is because assets create wealth given the right investment, and, historically at least, investment meant exploitation.

In one way or another environmental assets are converted in order to realise their value.

  • Trees become railway sleepers, pit props, roof trusses, furniture and firewood.
  • Flower filled meadows become livestock factories.
  • Ore bodies and coal seams become giant holes in the ground upstream of depleted and polluted waterways.

The environmentalist paradigm has been about saving the last remaining patches of unspoilt nature from this type of asset (resource) exploitation.

Preservation and conservation of nature has required extraordinary commitment, tenacity and sacrifice. Either from those who pushed for and created the legislation for environmental protection that helped knock back pollution and create national parks or from the more radical individuals who had to hug trees.

The arrival of global warming as the next serious threat to the environment has proven more difficult to fight. The only acceptable solution has been to try and reduce greenhouse gas emissions and this should have created another route for environmentalism, a partnership with the investment community to trade carbon.

An unlikely alliance parodied in green has moved on

Only she hasn’t.

So far the financiers have not joined in the unholy alliance. Perhaps they have been distracted by more immediate economic woes or simply got cold feet.

Market mechanisms for trading carbon are in place, accounting rules have been tested and projects in forestry, agriculture and energy are ready. Environmentalists have relented but still nothing.

Are we losing faith in markets just when we thought they might help solve environmental problems?

That would be quite an irony.