Link Banana

The Economist argues that trade bans may actually do more harm them good for the animals they seek to protect. They offer these solutions:

A better policy is to make wildlife more valuable to man, not less. One way that suits everybody is tourism. The gorillas in the Virunga mountains of Rwanda attract a lot of money from visitors. They are doing well, unlike their cousins over the border in Congo which do not earn their keep, and are prey to hunters who want to clear them out and take their land. Tourism is one way to help the Indian tiger, which is much rarer than people thought.

A second, less popular way to make money is to exploit animals sustainably. Killing individual creatures need not harm populations. Many animals may be farmed or ranched to create a valuable legal trade. That is what has happened with the vicuña, and with crocodiles and their kind. Rhino horns can be cut off without even killing rhinos.

Perhaps I’m alone in this, but I’d never thought that there was anything wrong with the way innovation is done. The Economist’s Tech.view column begs to differ:

But innovating the way industry does today—where problems go in search of solutions—is putting the cart before the horse. We should be doing it the other way round: finding the problem to which a known solution is an ideal answer. Matching inventions, discoveries and other bright ideas to problems this way would brilliantly streamline the process.

The Economist tackles the troubling situation in Zimbabwe and the hopeful — if remote — possibility that Robert Mugabe may finally have to leave office.

ROBERT MUGABE, Zimbabwe’s ageing president, celebrated his official birthday at the weekend. The 84-year-old threw a party at Beitbridge, on the border with South Africa, and launched his campaign for a sixth term in office. He has ruled for nearly three decades and expects to win re-election in a general and presidential election in March. He rehearsed his usual stump speech, hurling abuse at anyone who dares to stand up to him (he called one opposition leader, Simba Makoni, a “prostitute” and a puffed up frog) and blaming outsiders—notably George Bush and Britain’s Gordon Brown—for his country’s ever more miserable economic collapse.

This Europe.view column starts with an interesting premise:

IMAGINE Nazi rule in Germany surviving for decades, with Hitler undefeated in war and succeeded on his death in the early 1950s by a series of lacklustre party hacks who more or less disowned his “excesses”. Imagine then a “reform Nazi” (call him Michael Gorbach) coming to power in the 1980s and dismantling the National Socialist system, only to fall from power as the Third Reich collapsed in political and economic chaos.

Imagine a shrunken “German Federation” suffering ten years of upheaval, before an SS officer (call him Voldemar Puschnik) came to power, first as prime minister and then as president. Under eight years of rule by Herr Puschnik, Germany regains economic stability, largely thanks to a sky-high coal price.

It goes on to assert that current claims that the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was legal and that the Katyn massacre was no perpetrated by the Russians are tantamount to Holocaust denial. Interesting stuff, whether or not you agree with it.