This time it was different
As a child I was a consumer of a fair amount of environmentalist alarmism. Not the standard stuff you see on the news, but books like The Population Bomb. I also read the science fiction classic Stand on Zanzibar. Stand on Zanzibar is about an overpopulated Malthusian world. It is the world of 2010, and […]
Poachers attacking rhinos in the developed world
This is shocking. Poachers Kill Rhino in Brazen Attack at French Zoo: On Tuesday morning keepers at Thoiry Zoo, in the suburbs west of Paris, found the body of Vince, a four-year-old white rhino, in his enclosure with wounds to his head and one of his horns likely hacked off by a chainsaw, the zoo […]
Evolution, not ecology
One of my major gripes with my friends in ecology is that there is a tendency to look at every problem through the lens of ecological models. Garrett Hardin, who popularized the term “tragedy of the commons” is an exemplar of this. People i…
Nuclear power as the “shark attacks” of energy
Image Credit: Stefan Kuhn
I was at a coffee shop recently and a SWPL couple (woman had dreads to boot!) a number of tables away were reading a newspaper, and the husband expressed worry about the Fukushima disaster. The wife responded that “n…
Animal Apartheid
Here’s an article from Canada on the debate about whether hybridization should be discouraged. I understand the impulse toward preserving nature as it is, but the drive for presumed purity seems almost fetishistic. Consider this sentence: ” Or could hybrids actually weaken genetically pure populations of disappearing wildlife?” What does “genetically pure” mean in a […]