Category: Environment

Whale watchers in Norway got more than they bargained for recently:

While the tourists were admiring one of the great mammals of the sea, a Norwegian whaling boat approached and shot the whale in front of their eyes.

There’s a sort of cultural schizophrenia here, a country profiting both from selling the right to watch whales in all their native grace and also to kill them for profit. Not that much different from our own bizarre contradictions (we eat cows but not horses, chickens but not cats… why?) But weird when two sides of the public mind collide so viscerally.

via Weblogsky

Past threads about Pro-Nuke Greens have gotten me thinking hard about my life-long opposition to nuclear power. The arguments are strong. But I just spent some time immersed in Paul Fusco’s multimedia photo essay Chernobyl Legacy, and it’s very hard not to come away thinking, “It’s not worth it. We can’t take this risk.” Incredibly intense, moving, gruesome. Fusco narrates about how “they” assure us: “Yes, we made a mistake, but we’ve got it all figured out now. It won’t happen again.” But things that humans make can — and do — wear out, break. Maybe I’m just having an emotional reaction. But we weren’t there. We didn’t / aren’t living through the aftermath of Chernobyl. I somehow don’t think you could come up with any argument in the world to convince these people that humans should ever play with nuclear power again.

via antiweb

Wired covers the Test Tube Meat story. Short version: hamburger in two years, steak in 10 (steak requires better alignment of muscle fibers and the ability to recreate blood vessels running through). Stuff being grown without scaffolds in 1mm sheets, which can then be stacked to create thicker cuts.

The “yuck” factor: “But it’s not natural!” And how natural is it to stuff 10,000 chickens into a metal shed, snip off their beaks and pump them full of antibiotics and hormones? How natural is it for cows to eat corn? (which is pretty much all factory farmed cows eat, much to the detriment of their livers).

This research strikes me as a great leap forward in human consciousness. I hope that one day we’ll view factory farming as a barbarism of the past.

Previously: Lab Meat. See also Meat-Growing Robots (WTF?)

Technorati Tags: animalrights, food, meat

In The Conscience of a Carnivore (“It’s time to stop killing meat and start growing it”), William Saletan makes an eloquent moral case for our coming ability to grow meat in giant petri dishes, rather than raising it the old-fashioned way:

Growing meat like this will be good for us in lots of ways. We’ll be able to make beef with no fat, or with good fat transplanted from fish. We’ll avoid bird flu, mad-cow disease, and salmonella. We’ll scale back the land consumption and pollution involved in cattle farming. But 300 years from now, when our descendants look back at slaughterhouses the way we look back at slavery, they won’t remember the benefits to us, any more than they’ll remember our dried-up tears for a horse. They’ll want to know whether we saw the moral calling of our age.

Apparently they’ve already succeeded in growing fish flesh in a dish, which looked and smelled good enough to eat (though FDA rules didn’t allow them to taste it). Pork isn’t far behind.

To me, lab meat seems like the ultimate extension of what we already do with factory farming and slaughtering, in terms of its sterility and the way it removes us from the natural life/death cycle. But lab meat has the added moral advantage of not involving sentient life, which should place a large swath of vegetarians and Buddhists in an interesting position.

The piece is also available as a podcast (Slate has become my favorite podcast subscription). See also: Why meat may not be murder.

More than a mile down, hanging out near thermal vents off the coast of Easter Island, scientists have discovered a creature “so distinct from other species that they’ve created a new taxonomic family for it.” The “furry lobster,” which has pincer arms twice as long as its body and which has only vestigial membranes for eyes, may use its fur to trap bacteria, which it then consumes. Or maybe not. This kind of thing fills me with awe.

Mark Morford of the SF Chronicle:

Just look. Kiwa hirsuta is just a little bit mesmerizing, strange, stirs up something deep and potent. An eyeless, albino, crablike animal, sublime and magical and perfect in its alien weirdness … like something straight out of a medieval bestiary, a Sendak book, a Castaneda shaman’s peyote dream. It’s not a lobster. It’s not a crab. It’s not anything anyone really understands — and why is it covered in silky blond hair? They don’t know that, either. It just is. Just one of those things. Like why the whales sing. Like why some parrots can tell you who’s calling before you pick up the phone. Like the existence of dark matter. We just don’t know. And what’s more, the sheer volume, the breathtaking amount of information we don’t know is so mind-boggling and perspective-humping that you take one look at the Kiwa and only say, Hi again, wicked gorgeous unimaginable vastness of the universe.