Link Banana

I was kind of shocked that I hadn’t posted about this before, and then I realized that my original exposure to the topic came from the constantly solid audio program, Radiolab. If you prefer text, Keith O’Brien’s story (title link)  is what reminded me of the idea. From him I take this summary of the issue:

What he’d like to see more of, however, is in-depth discussion about animal welfare, how to best gauge it, and what to do about it if zoos are falling short of meeting animals’ needs. It’s a discussion that may lead to the conclusion that the zoos’ ultimate mission means giving up more of its animals, but Kagan’s all right with that.

This blog has briefly mentioned the idea of giving legal rights to nature before, but Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow offers an interesting analysis of the logic, history, and ramifications of the practice. Consider:

Richard Stewart, a law professor at New York University, believes that inanimate objects such as trees and rivers do not have interests or values. Rather, he says, the argument really concerns “human ideas about what’s good for nature.”

It’s daunting and distressing to look in the face of all the waste of the way we’re living.

(via J-Walk)

That seems a little surprising. How many searches do I get if I add loading the first result? It seems likely that there’s more green information in a newspaper, but only if you’re interested in all they’re delivering to you. Which I guess in the primary argument for the web in the first place.

(via G’modo)

Mark Dowie — in an adaptation from his recent book — examines a conflict I’d never considered: that between those trying to conserve a wilderness and those who’d historically made their home there.

Refugees from conservation have never been counted; in fact they’re not even officially recognized as refugees. But the number of people displaced from traditional homelands worldwide over the past century, in the interest of conservation, is estimated to be close to 20 million, 14 million in Africa alone. It is a sad history, and one that has forced conservationists to reevaluate the hero status of their movement’s founders, and to reconsider the idea of protecting biological diversity by removing humans from the mix.

Someone finally asked the Green Lantern the question I’d been meaning to since Slate started the column:

Green Lantern, you’re always telling us how bad meat is for the environment. I’m willing to throw some more zucchini kebabs on my barbecue this summer, but are all meats equally awful? Or are there some that I can grill with a little less guilt?

The answer’s pretty much in line with what had been my assumption: the bigger the animal, the less efficient the meat.

Also, this chart (pointed to by this post) provided a less thorough answer.

These are thoughts I can get behind:

…you can never get properly clean by simply wiping, since you are, effectively, pushing the [shit] into your skin.

I felt obligated to add the mild profanity that the author’s editor needlessly removed.

(via PSFK)

A conservation site for nearly dead words. You can do your part by pledging to start using a few in normal conversation.

(via BF)

Google disputes the rather dubious claim that each Google query causes 7 grams of CO2 to be released into the atmosphere.

First, sorry for the title.

Second, the chart attached to this article answers a question I’ve been meaning to ask a knowledgable person for a while: different kinds of meat really are different in the amount of carbon dioxide their raising produces. While chicken produce relatively little CO₂ per pound, beef makes quite a bit. Pork, shrimp, and salmon all fall between those two. All of those are (obviously) much less efficient than grains and other plants.

Also interesting: cheese is actually roughly as efficient, in CO₂ per pound terms, as shrimp.

(via Buzzfeed)

Hypothetical question: You’re heartsick about global warming, so you’ve just paid $25,000 to put a solar system on the roof of your home. How do you respond to news that it was manufactured with a chemical that is 17,000 times stronger than carbon dioxide as a cause of global warming?

I’d probably say, “Really!? Wow. That sucks. Is there any replacement.” To which the article says nothing.

(via Ideas)

Perhaps the fact that I discovered this on Metafilter is a commentary on the nature of news-flow or my inattentiveness, but it seems that Raphael Correa got a new constitution of the term-extending type that Hugo Chavez recently failed to secure.

Perhaps more interesting, the document gives inalienable rights to nature, like:

Art. 1. Nature or Pachamama, where life is reproduced and exists, has the right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution.

Every person, people, community or nationality, will be able to demand the recognitions of rights for nature before the public organisms. The application and interpretation of these rights will follow the related principles established in the Constitution.

For the eco-conscious consumer, there’s a new time sink aid available: GoodGuide. It’s description of itself:

GoodGuide™ provides the world’s largest and most reliable source of information on the health, environmental, and social impacts of products and companies. GoodGuide’s mission is to help you find safe, healthy, and green products that are better for you and the planet. From our origins as a UC Berkeley research project, GoodGuide has developed into a totally independent “For-Benefit” company. We are committed to providing the information you need to make better decisions, and to ultimately shifting the balance of information and power in the marketplace.

(via Snarkmarket)

Tyler Colman says that we need to get over the stigma about wine that comes from a box. One reason:

A standard wine bottle holds 750 milliliters of wine and generates about 5.2 pounds of carbon-dioxide emissions when it travels from a vineyard in California to a store in New York. A 3-liter box generates about half the emissions per 750 milliliters. Switching to wine in a box for the 97 percent of wines that are made to be consumed within a year would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by about two million tons, or the equivalent of retiring 400,000 cars.

Today’s good news: a new study found that there are many more western lowland gorillas in Congo than anyone expected. I found this line somewhat ironic:

“The message from our community is so often one of despair,” he said. “While we don’t want to relax our concern, it’s just great to discover that these animals are doing well.”

…by barring them from popular culture(?!). Maybe it’s just me, but this thesis seems a little absurd:

And many of those who imagined chimpanzees to be safe reported that they based their thinking on the prevalence of chimps in advertisements, on television and in the movies.

Having said that, I also didn’t know that chimpanzees are endangered. But I attribute it to insuffient publicity for that fact, not their presence popular culture.

That is kind of a self-evident fact, but with their increasing use in high-tech gadgets there’s justifiably increasing worry about the depletion of certain elements.

Gallium is thought to make up 0.0015 percent of the Earth’s crust and there are no concentrated supplies of it. We get it by extracting it from zinc or aluminum ore or by smelting the dust of furnace flues. Dr. Reller says that by 2017 or so there’ll be none left to use. Indium, another endangered element—number 49 in the periodic table—is similar to gallium in many ways, has many of the same uses (plus some others—it’s a gasoline additive, for example, and a component of the control rods used in nuclear reactors) and is being consumed much faster than we are finding it. Dr. Reller gives it about another decade. Hafnium, element 72, is in only slightly better shape. There aren’t any hafnium mines around; it lurks hidden in minute quantities in minerals that contain zirconium, from which it is extracted by a complicated process that would take me three or four pages to explain. We use a lot of it in computer chips and, like indium, in the control rods of nuclear reactors, but the problem is that we don’t have a lot of it. Dr. Reller thinks it’ll be gone somewhere around 2017.

(via kottke)

Tyler Cowen’s been evaluating the environmental impact of flying (first here, second in title). Though he’s far from a conclusive answer, intriguing facts have emerged. For example:

Cargo has to come into play, too. Regardless of what you pay and what fare class you’re booking in, your travel on United between San Francisco and Nagoya, Japan is going to have almost no effect whatsoever on United’s decision-making. They’ve got a very large contract with Toyota and they fill up their 747 with cargo and the flight goes out with very low load factors yet is still profitable for them to operate.

Actually, says the Green Lantern, if you’re really green you use your pants. If you’re not open to that, the often-ineffective solution is the greener one:

The bottom line is that hand dryers will be the greener choice in about 95 percent of circumstances. If the choice is between using a tiny corner of recycled towel versus a 2,400-watt dryer, then the Lantern can see how the towel will win. But dryers get the nod in most other scenarios, particularly if the dryer is rated at less than 1,600 watts. (Check the specs plate on the side if you’re really curious.)

Mark Bittman has some practical advice for omnivores looking eat less — not no — meat.

1. Forget the protein thing. Roughly simultaneously with your declaration that you’re cutting back on meat, someone will ask “How are you going to get enough protein?” The answer is “by being omnivorous.” Plants have protein, too; in fact, per calorie, many plants have more protein than meat.