Killing Me Loudly

'There was a dramatic reduction in ship traffic that day. It was like being on the primal ocean.'

Rosalind Rolland of the New England Aquarium "was at sea in the Bay of Fundy on 11 September 2001 ... [when] ...  noise levels from shipping fell by half, as transport was shut down in response the terror attacks" reports Environmental Research Web.

"Whales use sound as their primary sense, just as humans use sight, and their singing enables them to find food, mates and to navigate. They are believed to be able to communicate over hundreds of kilometres. But the frequencies they use largely overlap with the frequencies generated by human activities in the oceans, which have increased tenfold in volume since the 1960s, disrupting their ability to communicate" and inflicting chronic long-term stress due to the man-made noise pollution which endangers their health and life.

Cetaceans are not the only wild creatures who benefit from a drastic reduction in human activity. In that same year, 2001, Foot and Mouth Disease shut down human access to the Cornish coastline, at which point a couple of wild Choughs (Pyrrhocorax pyrrhocorax) chose to alight in the newly peaceful habitat. As Peter Marren was amused to recount in British Wildlife (14:2 pp 77-8):

"The release of captive-bred Choughs ... would, it was hoped, result in the establishment of a resident population ... However, foot-and-mouth restrictions placed the project on hold, and in the meantime some wild Choughs turned up out of the blue on the Lizard. [They] ... promptly nested and raised four chicks."

Maybe the best single thing that we humans, as a mass, could do for wildlife is to learn to sit down and shut up for a change.

Planet for Sale

Alexis Marant (interview here) has directed a new film called "Planete a Vendre" which will be on French TV April 19th 2011.

The Global Land Grab blog posts with more details, explaining the dangerous logic behind what's going on:

“To feed the 9.2 billion people expected by 2050 will require doubling agricultural production. A boon to investors who pushed up from 5 to 175 billion in speculative capital invested in agricultural commodities between 2000 and 2007.”

There's also a trailer here showing the factors that are now driving most wealthy Middle Eastern countries, for example, to get a-hold of poorer people's land overseas and make sure that their populations, which are also still increasing, will continue to be able to import most of the food they demand.

Don't ask where the poor will be able to grow their food in the future ...

Threat Multipliers

Man unkind chooses to build his vulnerable industrial complexes in hurricane, flood, earthquake and volcano areas. When natural disaster hits, as it obviously does, these go down like dominoes, piling man-made onto natural and creating mega disasters, or as Garry Peterson puts it, cascading disasters, which in turn may likely be magnified by a deliberately globalised financial system.

Ever more people, ever more industry, ever more threats.

Oh yes, man’s so clever he cuts himself on a regular basis.

It's a Lock-in

The Screeching of Positive Feedback

It shouldn't be a surprise to see chaos in a part of the world where human numbers have been and continue to double in mere decades, and fertile land as well as water for growing food is already insufficient and depleting rapidly. So, amid renewed talk of oil-induced recession, the world seems to be going round in ever more vicious circles:

Lack of investment in agriculture and population increase -> Food price rises -> civil unrest including in oil producing countries -> oil price increases -> food price increases -> more unrest -> and so on and on …

Actionaid USA have produced an interactive map of the places under greatest stress from food import dependency. They note that:

"As a result, [of subsidies] U.S. farmers have diverted 40 percent of corn production from food and feed to fuel, and land once used for soybean production has been converted to corn to meet the demand for biofuels set out in the federal RFS. Seven times as much corn is sent to ethanol plants than is being kept in our national stockpiles. Over the last two years, the amount of corn fed to livestock fell by 3 million metric tons, while corn shipments to ethanol producers grew by 33 million tons. These shifts put pressure on food stocks until they cross a tipping point, driving prices up."

"Spending scarce taxpayer dollars to shift crops from food to biofuels at the expense of hungry people and already stressed resources like soil, water and air is unsustainable."

HT Worldwatch blog.

Stuart Staniford at Early Warning blog points out that, "It's worth noting that the energy content of the human food supply is about a sixth of the energy content of the human fuel supply (about 86 mbd of liquid fuels, equivalent to somewhere in the neighborhood of 120-130mbd of ethanol). This is the core problem with converting food to fuel - we are taking from a small pool to try to make up for deficiencies in a large pool, and we will have a much bigger effect on the level of the small pool than the bigger pool."

Wealthy motorists and the private car lobby are literally driving the world into starvation and recession.

Live by the Dictator, Die by the Dictator

While the Establishment eagerly hope for a quick return to their Business-as-Usual model, doing their usual rounds of hob-nobbing with the international elite, luxury hotels and the attendant business jamborees, trade fairs and arms sales, others, like Humanist on Yahoo, are asking the obvious question: "Do Foreign evacuees from Libya remind you of rats leaving a sinking ship?"

Seems like some are happy to take stolen money and goods, but don't like the consequences of their actions when the people they've trodden over to get that wealth start objecting.