Our World and Everything in It

“We were in fully open ocean, dozens of miles from the ice pack, in a sort of half-fog at what passes for dusk around here, when a 10 foot wide chunk of ice flowed past. It was visible for maybe 15 seconds - the only ice we’d seen for days. On it: a polar bear, just drifting wherever the ocean wanted to take him” http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/feb2008/2008-02-11-01.asp.

I quoted that to say this. As the polar bear waits to get on the Endangered Species List, a decision that comes from the Department of the Interior, the polar bear’s habitat continues to disintegrate. It is practically wide-open seas according to the same article, and “the polar ice cap has reached its lowest extent in recorded history.” The summer Arctic may be ice-free as soon as 2040 and polar bear populations will decrease by two thirds. Out of an estimated 22,000 bears, that means over 14,500 polar bears will die. The one that floated by the Coast Guard Cutter is just one example that they won’t be afforded a quick death.

Many animals are at the mercy of the Department of the Interior lately, the wolves, and now the polar bears. The polar bear’s biggest and most volatile habitat is in the Chukchi Sea. Despite an outcry from native Eskimos, environmental groups, animal welfare organizations, a lawsuit, and citizens from around the world, the Chukchi Oil leases are going through as per the Dept. of the Interior. Royal Dutch Shell, and Conoco Phillips, you know the oil company that is supposedly investing in a green future like BP, plan to bid on the leases.
 
According to a Wall Street Journal Article Conoco Phillips said that “listing the polar bear as threatened ‘is not warranted’ based on the bears’ current population numbers. Listing them as threatened ‘will have an adverse impact on the oil and gas industry and people that live in the Arctic.’ Well I feel real sorry for the oil and gas industry, don’t you? Exxon Mobil netted $75000 per minute in 2006 and we should feel for the oil and gas industry and the heck with the polar bears? We’ll be on that soon-to-be extinct list too if ignoring ethics in favor of money, money, money keeps up.
 
The idea here is prevention. There are 22,000 bears, the Arctic is already open water so bear numbers will soon be declining rapidly without frozen land to walk and hunt. The Dept. of the Interior should put the bear on the list immediately to stop a catastrophic loss of most of that population, but waits instead using the bear’s current numbers to validate the delay. Meanwhile, the Dept. of Interior rushes to OK the auction of some 30 million acres in one the most pristine parts of the sea, a major polar bear habitat, for oil drilling?

I’m sorry but in a business situation the Department of the Interior’s single authority in both the protection of a clearly endangered species of animal like the polar bear and the very lucrative sale of the polar bear’s habitat for the purpose of drilling for oil presents a conflict of interest. And the delay in adding the polar bear to the Endangered List is an obvious morally unethical decision by a dubious Secy. of Interior, Dirk Kempthorne.

For Kempthorne, Conoco Phillips, and anyone else like President Bush that doesn’t appear to understand the English language, the word endangered means: exposed to danger, in peril. ENDANGERED DOES NOT MEAN ALREADY DEAD! The polar bear is in danger, and definitely in peril with a ruthless administration like this one.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120208255421639257.html?mod=googlenews_wsj.
http://world-wire.com/news/0802060002.html

A few blogs ago I wrote about setting an example as far as being humane to animals before we point fingers at other countries that dolphin hunt, seal hunt, whale hunt, and kill tigers, elephants, and apes.  Someone retorted about other countries, which was exactly what I made a point about NOT doing. After all, isn’t that one of the first things we teach siblings, not to point fingers elsewhere?

Anyway after the same commenter digressed to this being the best country in the world, the idea of being a good example was kind of lost in conversation. But it is important, and I am resurrecting the notion. Being good examples for all types of humanitarian efforts would give us much better leverage for persuading other governments to give up inhumane hunts like the renewed Japanese whale hunt.

An example of what I am talking about jumped off the “Verbatim” page of Time Magazine’s December 3rd issue. This Japanese whale-meat butcher in the whaling port of Shimonoseki, the home of Japan’s largest whaling expedition in decades, remarked about the inhumanity of it all: ‘”How is eating whale different from eating pigs or cows?”‘ See my point?

We’ll never get anywhere asking other countries not to seal, whale, or dolphin hunt when we slaughter and treat animals inhumanely ourselves. It looks like pollution may halt hunts like these before conscience even comes into play. The Japanese plan on hunting 50 endangered pin whales and 50 threatened humpback whales, along with others, totaling 1000. Trouble is, just like the dolphin meat from the barbaric Japanese dolphin hunt, the whale meat is more than likely poison, tainted by chemical toxins. Many of the larger species of fish and mammals in the ocean are contaminated. A current study by: “Norwegian scientists found that killer whales - or orcas, as they are sometimes known - have overtaken polar bears at the head of the toxic table” according to a BBC article. It said: “No other arctic mammals have ingested such a high concentration of hazardous man-made chemicals.” I was a little amazed at what was found in the blubber, traces of pesticide, flame retardant, and PCB’s. The WWF or World Wildlife Foundation says, “The Arctic has become a chemical sink.”

But are the Japanese worried? Why should they be? An opinion poll done last year by the Nippon Research Centre found that 95% percent of Japanese never or rarely ate whale meat. So why the hunt? Like I stated in another blog, this hunt is being done under the guise of research. The odd thing is another study found that, “65% of Japanese students agreed with the view that scientific research on whales should only use non-lethal methods.”

All the bad international press about this whale hunt embarrasses Japan’s leadership. Japanese don’t eat the meat. A majority of Japanese college students do not advocate the killing of a species in order to study it. And the meat is more than likely poisoned. But the hunt goes on? Sounds like other countries have the same problem as we do where a majority of voices go unheard, and unheeded.
 
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4520104.stm
http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/news/fearing-us-reaction-japanese

Robusta coffee might ring a bell to coffee aficionados out there but I am not one. When I was young I never drank coffee during warm weather. It made me sweat. I would occasionally drink it in the winter but never at my own apartment. I couldn’t afford a coffee pot or the coffee, and I like it with cream or milk, sometimes sweet. That would mean that I would have to stock all of that. Living on my own in the 70’s was just shy of being a pauper. We left home before the age of 30 back then, most of the time we weren’t even 20 yet. Milk, sugar, and coffee were an extravagance to have around.  I relied heavily on vitamins, a can of tuna, a can of cream of mushroom soup, a can of peas, and noodles and you pretty much know what I had there. 

Now I’m past middle age and one would think I need coffee to start up in the morning. Wrong. Turns out I’m naturally hyper…and am sensitive to caffeine. I don’t even drink regular diet Pepsi at night. It has to be caffeine free. But I’ve started to like the taste of coffee since those flavored, fat free creamers came out. I drink decaf just for the taste of java. But recently I ran across some articles that Indonesian tigers, elephants, and rhinos are being threatened by a certain type of coffee called ROBUSTA because it is illegally grown in patches of plantation that invades the perimeter of a particular game park, Bukit Barisan Selatan (BBS) National Park in Sumatra. The park is a reserve that is supposed to protect the habitat of these endangered species. The World Wildlife Federation had a really good article on sun-grown coffee, and another on peopleandplanet.org about this growing problem.

The illegally grown Robusta coffee beans are mixed with legitimate beans and American companies like Nestle, Kraft, and others aren’t prepared to screen all imported beans, so they don’t know what they’ve got.  I learned that traditionally, coffee is grown in the shade under a canopy of trees. These shade coffee plantations have a high biodiversity of birds and animals much like a rainforest.  These shade coffee plantations are being transformed into industrialized sunny plantations with little shade. Without a lot of explanation we can see this will result in a loss of biodiversity for animals that thrive in shade coffee plantations and that their habitat is threatened over coffee. 

And there is a problem with sun grown coffee. It may turn over faster but requires a heck of a lot of fertilizer, care, and water than is required of the slower growing shade coffee. So the Robusta brand is not an environmentally friendly coffee bean using more water than necessary, and causing more fertilizer runoff into fresh water supplies while eliminating the rich green life-sustaining canopy of forest like the traditional coffee everyone was perfectly happy with before.

Do you know what kind of bean you’re drinking? Is this going to be a problem for Starbucks? They have an awful lot of environmentally friendly customers nationwide. Sir Paul debuted his latest CD at Starbucks and we know he’s all about preservation and respect for animals. If Kraft and Nestle are hard put to figure out what they’re importing how would Starbucks know which of their 100’s of combinations of coffee contain beans that are threatening elephants, tigers, and rhinos? And what about Dunkin Donuts, and the thousands of coffee houses everywhere?

I love elephants, tigers and rhinos so when I finish the last of my instant decaf, that’s it for me, Robusta beans or not. If you’re thinking of cutting back, now is the time to do it. Here is a little anecdote about elephants: Science has long stated that the difference between animals and people is the ability to recognize themselves as an individual in a mirror, that most animals think it’s another animal or that their reflection registers nothing at all. Well just last year I watched on GMA an experiment at a sanctuary for elephants. A large mirror was put in a pen. The elephants occasionally looked at themselves but the researchers had no idea if the animal recognized its own particular reflection. That is until someone swiped a patch of paint on one of the elephant’s heads. That elephant looked in the mirror and immediately tried to rub the paint off, and kept checking. I wonder if it was a female elephant? 
http://www.peopleandplanet.net/doc.php?id=2918

http://www.panda.org/about_wwf/where_we_work/asia_pacific/where/singapore/news_publications/index.cfm?uNewsID=91840